


And All This Devotion I Never Knew At All

by lilith_morgana



Series: Heaven for a sinner like me [2]
Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Friendship, Lucifer Bingo 2019 (Lucifer TV)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-08-31
Packaged: 2020-07-10 04:42:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 36,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19900003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilith_morgana/pseuds/lilith_morgana
Summary: Last time he ended up in Hell nobody protested. This time it’s different. This time the Devil has friends.Pre-canon through post-S4-territory. Deckerstar-centric ensemble story.





	1. It goes like this

**Author's Note:**

> Written for LuciferBingo prompt: **please don’t let me go** , which made me think of Florence + the Machine’s _Never let me go_ which made me think of hymns and Cohen’s _Hallelujah_ which made me think of Lucifer and the people that bloody well love him which made me wordy, apparently.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Earth makes him better. Heals him in a way Heaven never could. No matter his rebellion, no matter the war that followed, she cannot believe, in her heart, that Father would want his son away from this._

_Lord, we know what we are,_  
_but not what we may be._  
William Shakespeare, _Hamlet  
  
***_

**I** \- _it goes like this_

  
It goes like this:

Ever since her creation he’s her favorite. 

The kindest of all her brothers, the one that flies the highest and laughs the loudest, who teases and tricks and _laughs_ like he’s made of light, of stars, of chords and notes and a music so powerful it could break the world apart. It actually _can;_ the knowledge makes him proud, makes his eyes glitter.  
  
The _loudest_ of all her brothers, the one that asks - no, shouts - _why_ more often than he listens to the answer, the one that leaps to conclusions, to anger, to unprovoked fights with his brothers and sisters over nothing - or at least it’s nothing often enough for them to disregard him. That lingers even later when it’s _not_ nothing. The boy who cried wolf, the humans call it. A whole story to describe the brother Azrael loves until her chest hurts. 

When they are small, not exactly children because they never were, Lucifer protects her with his wings as she learns to fly, stumbling and hissing. Shields her against Michael's rebukes, against Uriel's pestering, against Amenadiel's dull sermons. He makes music when she asks him to, creates stories for her, flies her through the pitch-black night sky with strong arms around her waist and Azrael tucks her head under her big brother's chin and smiles, smiles, _smiles_.  
  
She guides their journeys, he shapes the path. They are as inseparable as Heaven allows them to be.   
  
Once, Father chides her for not using the powers that were instilled in her at creation, for not subjecting to the will of her own being. The heed of her celestial body. Azrael has been mediocre at her training, has been unfortunate - _reluctant_ , _child, you are willfully ignorant -_ with the small tasks she’s handed and Father is angry. She feels as though she’s been destroyed by the flaming sword, as though her soul has been shattered.  
  
Lucifer argues in her place, takes her sadness and frustration and wields them into arguments, into weapons. He is magnificent as he opposes Father; the rest of them watch in fear and amazement.  
  
He is punished in her place; she holds his hand as he blinks away tears and neither of them ever speak of this again. Next time she is in trouble he does the same, without hesitation. These are still early days for their family; he still believes in Father’s respect, in Mother’s enduring love, he still considers himself the angel of dawn.  
  
He is. He is shameless curiosity, sharp intelligence and his heart - oh his _heart -_ is a force of the universe all in itself, a deep, dark pulse that holds the stars together. He is more like Father than he will ever know, than either of them can bear.  
  
He is an unrest in the Silver City, a whisper of revolution in a perfect paradise, an irreverent sinner in the face of the divine. 

He is everything. 

\---

Before Azrael was created, they say, Father loved Lucifer the best. More than anything he had created, more fiercely than Mother. Her older brothers tell her this, mouths curled in disapproval, words stiff and harsh with jealousy.  
  
Samael, beautiful like the night. Beautiful and brilliant and wayward and fearless; utterly _stunning_ , a celestial being in its truest form.  
  
Before Azrael was created, they say, Samael was Father’s closest ally and favorite son. That he would speak to him more often, more honest than he speaks to any other being and that Samael, eager to please and yearning for love would ask the right questions, play the most astonishing pieces of music, let the massive scope of his powers build a moon, a nebula, a pattern in the sky. If you wanted Father’s attention, they tell her, you would have to go through the favorite son.  
  
Azrael wishes sometimes that she could have seen her brother then, back when he was Samael, lit from within by God himself.  
  
When she is brought to life he is already Lucifer, already falling. Michael says he has a remarkable capacity for cruelty, Amenadiel that he lacks the understanding of faith, Uriel speaks of eccentric patterns, possibilities of great evil, Gabriel refuses to talk about him altogether and Remiel, not much older than Azrael but ancient in her judgement scoffs and calls him a monster, a snake.

Lucifer, in turn, calls Father _tyrant_ , his Creation _a cruel manipulation, a mockery of free will._  
  
Azrael calls him Lu, calls him brother, loves him like she loves nothing else in Heaven because there is nothing in Heaven or the universe that needs love as much as he does, his entire being a wide-open space of _want_ where Father’s affection and Mother’s devotion used to be.  
  
Without it he falls and she can’t catch him.

  
\---  
  
  
  
“What is it this time, Lu?” she asks, watching him slam his wings into a bush, scaring a few birds. She _likes_ birds, it’s a nice touch from Father giving them almost angelic features.  
  
His face softens at the sight of her, always, but it’s still a mask of anger and - she thinks with a sense of dread - _pain_. “What is it _not_ , Rae-Rae?”  
  
She hurries to keep his pace as he walks the narrow paths around Eden, struggles to hold his attention long enough to understand but he is too introverted in his thoughts, too absorbed in his own problems to notice her.  
  
“Tell me?” she asks later, as they rest together in a secluded valley, passing a bottle of nectar between them. “Please?”  
  
It’s Eden, she knows this but would still like to hear it from him and not just from the other angels speaking _for_ him. But of course it’s Eden and the humans residing there, their set of rules and boundaries that Father has bestowed upon them. Lucifer finds it revolting, finds it obscene, rages against his place in the structure that will uphold the little human world that Father loves so dearly. Remiel says it’s the humans he finds disgusting but Azrael suspects that might be her sister’s own bias shining through. Lu can’t stand shackles and the humans, he believes, are going to be manipulated, pawns on a board of chess. Like the angels. Like the animal creatures. _What, I ask, is the purpose of that? To amuse a cruel god?_  
  
He sighs now; his breath tickles the small hairs on her arm, his shoulder rests against hers.  
  
“It’s better if you don’t know.”  
  
“Better for you?”  
  
“No, sister.” He frowns. “For you.”  
  
He was always so much like Father.

\---  
  
  
  
A rebellion, a fracture of a moment that shatters and spreads, like rings on water.  
  
He stands in the Silver City one day, his posture so proud and tall as though he still believes he is infallible. Lilith is there, too, carrying a silver sword as she looks ahead, her pretty face solemn and prepared. She has been awaiting an uproar, everyone knows this. Behind them there’s a flock of lesser angels, scurrying like servants. The scraps of Heaven.  
  
Azrael feels her throat tighten. She cannot speak, cannot move.  
  
Listens as her most loved brother, her Lu with the kind eyes and the wicked mind, claims that today marks the end of Father’s regime over Heaven, the end of Father’s hold over his angels.  
  
Listens as he shouts of cages, of restrictions, of accountability and the power of desire.  
  
In that moment she knows that he has destroyed Eden.  
  
In that moment she knows that he will be destroyed, in return.   
  
She wonders for thousands and thousands of years if his rebellion was planned ahead, if he carried the betrayal in his heart or if it had merely happened, accidentally in a fit of rage. Wonders if the torment that follows is a just dessert or merely agony caused by a rash impulse that breaks his - _her_ \- entire world.  
  
The latter is a very likely pattern for our dear brother, Uriel drawls in her head and she punches mind-Uriel in the face.  
  
She wonders for thousands and thousands of years if Lucifer had ever thought of _her_ at all.  
  
If leaving had hurt half as much as watching him go. 

* * *

  
  
  
In all of his existence, no one has angered him more than Lucifer.  
  
He is golden and brash, a terror of a brother and sadly just as sweet as he is impossible. Foul-mouthed and honest, as well as impatient and unrestrained, moving from one thing to another as though his brilliant mind cannot settle.  
  
It is, Amenadiel knows, because he lacks pure faith in his purpose and has replaced it with an illusion of freedom, of free will to an extent that it would border on the absurd. Instead of finding a deeper meaning behind the matters of their existence, Lucifer questions them endlessly. Why, what, how, where, to what purpose, to what extent, according to what plan? Words, words, _words_.  
  
Father says that there will be living creatures on Earth, a divine decision that has the angels singing.  
  
Only Lucifer, obstinate and coy, asks _why_.  
  
Because of course he does.  
  
And Father, infuriatingly, rewards him with His presence, His explanations, gives freely of the precious time that He so rarely offers anyone else but the reluctant son who doesn’t even _want_ it.  
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
“I am not an aspect of your divinity, Father. I am no part of you, I am _myself_!” Lucifer is magnificent even in defeat, Amenadiel has to give him that. “I separate myself from you. You can kill me. In fact, go ahead! But you cannot claim me back.”  
  
_You reject me, Samael?_  
  
“No.” His voice breaks but he doesn’t. “I reject _this_.”  
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
The Silver City is silenced by his exile.  
  
Silenced, heartbroken, half-destroyed.  
  
Most of them, if not all, blame Lucifer.  
  
Most of them, if not all, grieve for him all the same.  
  
Amenadiel leads Lucifer out through the gates with a sensation of deep sadness filling his body. _Luci_ , he thinks in a moment of weakness, a dangerous lack of conviction grabbing hold of his soul. _Little brother, I have failed you._  
  
He remembers Mother’s lavish displays of affection for the light-bringer, how she’d embrace him with every particle of her being and sing to him the songs of Creation, of his genesis. She would always make it sound like something differentiated Samael from all the other angels, like his design was another story, a better one. Maybe it was, once. Amenadiel doesn’t claim to know the plans for his brothers and sisters, would never be arrogant enough. _Oh brother, such an atrocious liar._  
  
He remembers Father’s unwavering attention before Samael came, back when Amenadiel was the first of all the angelic children such as they were, the first of his kind. _Father always requires a bit of practice,_ Luci teases him once. _Consider yourself a draft._  
  
Yet here he stands, the perfect angel torn out of the sky. They have wounded him badly, bruised his face and cut into his smooth flesh, torn the clothes off his body as they banished him. He's still majestic. It makes it easier, it makes it harder.  
  
“Brother,” Amenadiel says, one hand on Lucifer’s shoulder, the other around his arm.  
  
His brother turns his head; there is a rivulet of blood from an injury on his cheek, a crack across his right eyebrow. There is blood in Heaven and on his hands and he must remind himself of this now, must repeat the images of his brother’s offenses if he is to endure the part that follows.  
  
“I am not your brother,” Lucifer says and the hollowness of his voice breaks something in Amenadiel’s chest, leaves something bitter and _raw_ there for at least a few millennia, perhaps for all eternity. “I’m a monster.”   
  
Then he falls.  
  
  
  
\---

  
  
  
They say one third of the angels fell with the Morningstar.  
  
Amenadiel only remembers how desolate his brother had looked, how empty the ranks had seemed, how small his tall, broad frame had appeared on the day of his exile.  
  
They say one third of the angels fell with the Morningstar.  
  
Amenadiel cannot bear to count.

* * *

**II** \- _the fourth, the fifth_

  
  
They share an eternity in a place where time is of no value.  
  
As soon as they leave Hell, that eternity crumbles into dust and Maze wishes it didn’t. It means a lot to her what they had, what they were to each other and to the kingdom; he brushes it off like the _bloody ash_ from the hellfire.  
  
That taste of fire doesn’t leave her mouth for months when they first arrive and when it does, she misses it like crazy. Lucifer feels it too and drinks like he’s in the middle of a desert, trying to burn away the remains of home in his throat. She never wanted to leave, he always wanted to go. His will is her command so now they’re here.  
  
It’s not a compromise even if he calls it one.  
  
He gets furniture for her own flat within the ridiculous estate he’s bought, gets her clothes and one of those silly money cards. He sets up her human identity and gives her driving lessons. That last part of their earthly life she _loves_ . The last time they are sex partners is, in fact, in one of his cars after she has driven through the highway far too fast and feels high on the excitement and danger and Lucifer chuckles seductively deep in his throat, watching her breasts rise and fall. Then he lets her kiss him - never the other way around, she doesn’t reflect on it until they are on Earth - and straddle him in the backseat. _Fuck me, lord of Lux_ she jokes and he does, oh does he _ever_ .  
  
Those are good days, they feel like home.  
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
Earth changes him, day by day, little by little. It’s a slow transgression. She wonders if he even notices.  
  
He finds things in the humans that she can’t see, hides in their attraction and wonder, in the hungry way they look at him. Everybody does - he is _magnetic_ and most of the people on Earth are mediocre at best. He who has lived for an eternity without adoration, without love, mistakes everything for it here in this shallow, glittering city. Or it’s not a mistake, maybe, but a willful ignorance of some truths. She can’t blame him for it, she has been by his side since he first arrived in Hell, a broken angel who punished himself more violently than any of the residents. He still does; it’s one of the things they never speak of, one of the things she finds so darkly attractive about him. A desperate pull inside him, a desolate black hole. He _reeks_ of unhealed pain and up here a demon chick has to take what she can get.  
  
Here he seems to find solace. Maze tries to be happy about it even as she misses home so much that not even violence can resolve it.  
  
Earth changes him or restores him, she never knew him _before_ so she can’t tell which.   
  
It softens his angelic side and sharpens the devilish one until the clash between them feels even bigger than it did down in Hell. 

He’s happier on Earth but endlessly lonely in his glittering tower. He plays fast and loose with his own principles but his wrath blazes like Doomsday every time he finds faults in the humans. He’s angrier on Earth but much gentler, doesn’t want to _create any new evils, Mazikeen, surely you can wrap your demon mind around that fact, eh_ and refuses to let her treat her partners with what he calls disrespect.  
  
“You will not do _anything_ against their will!” he thunders when he finds one of Maze’s first L.A lovers in tears, running out of _Lux_ with a bruise on her cheek. It’s not as bad as it seems and Maze has a cut on her inner thigh to prove it - it had turned out that demon strength is always superior to human ditto, regardless of the human’s fitness status, lesson damn well _learned_ \- but Maze never gets to explain that because the Lord of Hell snaps off any attempts at conversation. "Demons do not belong on Earth so while you're here you _will_ remember that."

It's easy for an angel to say. He's nothing if not a cruelly perfect version of a human. 

Maze struggles, makes a mess, picks the wrong fights. He shuffles the notions of her unease away, pretends they're here on equal terms after all. 

She hates him a little for it, once she grasps the whole human emotion thing. 

  
\---

  
  
Earth changes her, it comes crashing in waves. He never notices.   
  
She stumbles, she struggles. She tries to disdain Amenadiel the way Lucifer does - or most likely he _doesn’t_ , she can’t tell his complex stupid feelings apart - but finds his certainty reassuring, his composure attractive. Desire, at least, Lucifer has taught her thoroughly about. Want, have, take. Or rather: want, fuck, leave.  
  
It doesn’t work with Amenadiel.  
  
It doesn’t work as well as it used to with her either and she blames Lucifer for breaking her.  
  
In Hell she is a mistress of torture, a high-ranking demon with a purpose and a master answering to no one. On Earth she is Mazikeen Smith, lacking in friends and usable skills and her boss is running a nightclub, at best. Mostly Lucifer swaggers around with his accent and his magnetism, sprinkling cash and condoms all over the place. It makes _no sense_ but he wins them over even if he’s the most annoying fucking idiot she can think of some days.  
  
He befriends a cop, the cop’s kid, then a _priest_ . It’s like they’ve joined a circus, the annoying crap never stops, there’s always a new thing waiting around the corner. Like mortality. Maze wants to break his skull when he tells her about that in his flippant Earth-tone. He thinks he’s _charming_ ; she thinks he’s going to get them all destroyed.  
  
He falls as desperately in love with the cop as he once fell from Heaven. Well, she wouldn't know for sure but it certainly _seems_ as transformative and just as hopeless given that he’s the Devil and she’s an uptight human woman who will run for the hills the moment she spots his true form. Maze brings it up, Lucifer brushes it off, smiles into his drinks and cancels dates to _work_ .  
  
Maze has never seen him like this, never even close. The cop has _only_ seen him like this, it will not end well.  
  
Maze watches, drinks and seethes. Worries.   
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
She is sworn to him by oaths the humans would back away in terror if they knew half of.  
  
Earth messes that up, too. Maze learns that she can betray him without her life being forfeit, learns that she can be used as a - lethally hot, leather-clad - pawn in the game of celestial chess everyone suddenly appears to be playing. She leaves Lux and him; her loyalties are immovable until they aren’t. It spins, everything spins and she lands on the square that says _Lucifer_ , once more. Ever the loyal servant. Or friend. She thinks they are friends, hopes. 

Even as he refuses her dedicated protection against the Mother they have kept in Hell for a millennia and then rewards her hard work by making plans behind her back. Even then. When she at long last is allowed to beat him bloody because of it, the urge to cry is too overwhelming, even takes the pleasure out of ruining his stupid suit. It stings in her throat, aches in her chest. It _hurts_ .  
  
“I’m sorry, Mazikeen,” he says, eventually, _finally_. “I should have realized.”  
  
“Yeah.” She nods. “You should have. When it comes to feelings you’re way worse than I am, Mr Sad Piano.”  
  
His scoff is mild, defeated. “I suppose.”  
  
“So,” she says back at _Lux_ , uncertain of how they are meant to deal with this bullshit now.  
  
“So,” he says, too, unceremoniously ripping off destroyed clothes and replacing them with new ones. “What do you say about Mexican and - oh, perhaps a tequila race until dawn?”  
  
“Yeah. Yeah, sure.”  
  
“Brilliant.” He beams at her, his Earth-grin in place.  
  
And she loves him a lot more than loyalty demands, once they both grasp the human emotion thing.

* * *

  
  
  
Azrael is delighted when Lu gets voluntarily stranded on Earth. 

Earth means that she gets to see him, watch him.  
  
He plays the piano for her in the Silver City, plays the kind of music that bounces off the stars and explodes in the sky. _Endlessly_ he plays, through conflicts and impending terrors and Azrael sits beside him with her heart wide-open and her eyes closed. Often he sings, too, but it’s the musical instruments that he truly loves and they love him back, were made for him, for his body, his slender fingers.  
  
She talks and he listens; Lu plays and she sits with him. It’s an unspoken agreement.  
  
He plays the piano for the humans in Los Angeles, plays another kind of music that is irreverent and seductive in its own fashion, plays it as though his life depends on it and often, she assumes, it might be the case. Whenever she visits him in the shadows of the Earth she stays for the rest of the song, a little part of her vainly hoping that the music will never end.

  
\---

  
  
Azrael knows he can sense her sometimes. Perhaps every time. He’d never make contact, he’s entirely too suspicious for it, too wounded and neither of them would know what to say.  
  
So she watches, invisible. He never calls out.  
  
She entertains the thought that Lucifer’s ego is too thick, wrapped around him like a shield against other beings, other emotions than his own. She likes to pretend he’s too self-absorbed, too little in balance with his angelic powers, not half as aware as Amenadiel, who looks around for her the moment she approaches even his block, let alone the building he’s residing in. She fears sometimes that Hell has dulled his senses or that the rebellion stole all that was godlike in him.  
  
It’s not true, though. Lu _shivers_ with powers, still. Shivers with the force that could reshape a universe if he lets it but he doesn’t. He puts it to other uses, channels it inwards, pours it out into songs, into sex, into crowds.  
  
Azrael is the focus, the force of death that has to be contained and measured to provide the balance. What there is to know about temperance and self-control, _she_ knows. It’s a burden she only shares with Lucifer because his is the same, carries the same weight. Even here on Earth, _especially_ here on Earth, the strength of him must be immense to keep it all contained, to control the magnetism and desire he was created for.   
  
The humans love to succumb to him, willing little subjects offering their innermost desires in abundance, offering their bodies, their secrets, their time. He plays with it, she can tell, but there are lines he refuses to cross already in the beginning, later he re-draws even those, tightens his leash on himself. They entertain him, he allows himself the pleasure, but he grants them a respect that surprises even her.  
  
The humans love to hate him, even as they make fools of themselves out of their desire for him.  
  
Azrael sees it sometimes in their eyes when they watch him: disgust, frustration, dislike. A slightly warped attraction mixed with anger towards the man they see and what he reveals about themselves, certainly, but there’s another thing, too. Jealousy. The angry assumption that he gets away with everything. 

Oh, they haven't seen Hell, she thinks.

Oh, they haven't seen him cutting - tearing, yanking, ripping - his wings off in agony, his hands shaking and his eyes blank. How he screams into his own flesh, how he turns up the human music to drown the noise his pain causes. The way he is slumped on the floor afterwards, fingers twisted into the divine feathers and the longing on his face then, the absolute agony. 

Oh, they haven't seen him in those gaps between darkness and light, before day breaks through. The way he paces, stirs, stands by his window like a solitary god in a long-abandoned empire; the way he plays the piano then, only ever the chords meant for Heaven, only ever the songs he used to play for Father. _This will take all night, darling_ , she hears him say to the long string of partners that he drags back to his home. _All_ _night_ and she wonders who the promise is for.

They have not seen him at all if they think her brother gets away with anything. 

They have not seen him at _all_.  
  
He slips. He falls again and again. But he's different up here, more himself, so he also rises.  
  
The humans begin to like him, respect him. She can see it on their faces, the unadulterated _appreciation_. It hits her like a surge of warm joy to witness it. He claims to do favors for favors but Azrael rarely sees him cash in on anything, never sees him take advantage of the lesser intellects or inferior bodies though he _could_. Sometimes the temptation is tangible in the air around him but he restrains it, walks away.  
  
Earth makes him better. Heals him in a way Heaven never could.  
  
No matter his rebellion, no matter the war that followed, she cannot believe, in her heart, that Father would want his son _away_ from this. 

* * *

Chloe falls in love with him over the chase around town for his wings.

It’s so damn ridiculous that it tips the scale and becomes normal. Kind of like the man himself.  
  
“To our equally enigmatic futures,” he says and raises a glass to her after a successful closure to his case. And she thinks that she wants to be in his, that she wants him to be in hers. She doesn’t say it.  
  
She falls in love with him over daily routines and work, over stakeouts and takeouts and god-awful flirting that still tickles on the inside because he leans closer and smiles that electric smile and she thinks about kissing him, about spreading her hands over his chest and wrapping her fingers around the strands of his hair. He knows all too well that he’s attractive with his playboy routines but Chloe wonders if he knows how effortlessly _sexy_ he is when he doesn’t try, when he just sits beside her and reads paperwork, scratching the stubble on his chin. 

She falls in love with him because of the way he has stolen Trixie's fearless little child-heart to such an extent that she Ubers to him when she is upset. And the fact that he texts Chloe right away but always lets her stay for a while so she can emerge from his penthouse with a triumphant grin. 

Chloe falls in love with him easily, happily. He's impossible and _gorgeous_ and just rebellious enough to appeal to her by-the-book-approach. And when she realizes that there’s something incredibly hurt resting below the surface, a great vulnerability that drowns out his more obnoxious bits fairly well, she just wants him all the _more_ for it. Someone’s all but destroyed him once and she can’t look away from the scars, needs to trace all of them back to their origin.   
  
She falls in love because he’s different from every man she has ever met even when he breaks her heart.

* * *

In all of his existence, no one has angered him more than Lucifer.  
  
When Amenadiel returns alone after his brother’s fall, Father stands there, a sole presence in the massive throne room. He does not speak, though this is not unusual - he reserves his words for Samael, for his humans, for Mother, for those more worthy - but looks straight into his firstborn’s eyes. Amenadiel swallows bile as he divulges that yes, the deed has been carried out and yes, Lucifer has left Heaven.  
  
Father turns away in silence at his words.  
  
“Justice has been served, Father.” Amenadiel is still on his knees. Has Lucifer _ever_ knelt, ever bowed?  
  
Time passes, he remains. Eventually Father looks at him again and there is currently no light in his being, only shades of darkness, of despair.  
  
_You may leave, Amenadiel._  
  
It is one of the rare sentences his Father ever speaks directly to him.  
  
Amenadiel straightens his back and lowers his head, leaves.  
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
It is known in the Silver City that God, in his boundless grief and anger over his lost son, tears apart the star clusters his light-bringer once created from dust. Tears them apart but cannot bring himself to destroy them. The clusters remain, separated but always intertwined. A father’s everlasting love for his child.  
  
He wonders if Lucifer knows this, if he would _care_.  
  
“Surely you have us confused now, dear brother,” Lucifer says to him in Paris, once. He is half-naked, drunk, decadent as usual and Amenadiel’s fury is a chain of lightning in his blood but he stands calmly by a window, hands behind his back. Pleased with himself for his self-restraint. “ _You’re_ the servant. _I_ am the one who says ‘no’ to dear old father who art in Heaven. Always have, _always_ will.”  
  
“Must be so good to be you, Luci. To never care about anyone else but yourself. To completely disregard both human and celestial suffering in the wake of your destruction.”  
  
“Destruction, _really_? Is this destruction?” He shrugs off the scant clothing that still touches his body, gesturing towards the traces of food and human company that are scattered all over the room.  
  
Amenadiel flashes angry, feels the angelic form shake inside its shackles. “It certainly isn’t _worthy_. It is degrading for a celestial-”  
  
“I am the King of Hell! You will not speak to me of degradation!” Lucifer throws a wine bottle at him, eyes red-hot fire and fists clenching and it’s _good_ , Amenadiel thinks, for a brief moment it is good to feel the anger seep out of him and into the air between them as he licks blood from his fingers from where the broken glass hurt him.  
  
Hundreds of years later, surrounded by an idiotic crowd first and then, some years later by sand and burning feathers, Amenadiel slams his fists into his brother’s face again. Blindly, at first, his entire body boiling with pent-up fury, disappointment, confusion, frustration. _How can this be right, Father?_ His brother smells of tobacco and fuel and fire and grins through his own pain, the trail of betrayal almost visible on them both. _Are we the same, Father?_  
  
“Go on, brother,” Lucifer urges. “Give in. Become wrath. Fall as I did.”  
  
Amenadiel relents. He relents - momentarily then, permanently later - and repents. Becomes his brother's keeper like he is meant to be, was always meant to be and he can see it so _clearly_ once the haze of haughtiness and blind conviction leaves and opens his eyes to what he has done. The error of his ways.

And even so, he falls.

* * *

When she first learns the truth about Lucifer, Linda drinks two bottles of white wine on an empty stomach and lies hazily in her bed, googling increasingly misspelled denotations and connotations of Satan until she falls asleep with the screen plastered over her face. She wakes up some time later, disoriented and bloated and finds that there’s a gift basket by her doorstep - Merlot, chocolate, olive oil, flavored condoms of a brand she remembers that he likes -  
  
Oh my god. Oh my _god_. _Compartmentalize, Linda. Yes, there we go._  
  
She breathes into a paper bag, goes to bed without brushing her teeth and waits for the drunken sleep to kick in again. If she expects to dream of something in particular - she never does, her patients often claim they do - it would be the fires of hell. Instead she dreams of her childhood cat Miss Piggy, a carrot and Brian, one of the fellow psychiatrists she runs into at the annual conferences in Boston and who, in her dream, had run a travel company shuttling people to Pluto. All things considered, it's no less plausible than current affairs.   
  
The following morning she reschedules her early appointments, reschedules her evening plans with Maze - oh my God, oh MY _GOD_ \- and wonders how many more things she will have to change in her life to withstand this; outside there’s another gift basket full of luxurious foods and a perfume he knows she adores because he had once found it in her bathroom. (Frankly, Reese would never even have remembered the name.) Attached to it is a note written in old-fashioned, even handwriting: _Please, don’t be afraid._ A tug beneath her breastbone, a swirl in her stomach.  
  
Then her evening plans with Maze happens only not exactly the way they had thought they would, which gives Linda another morning of dry-mouthed mess - and a third gift basket. He’s still the same old Lucifer, Maze had said. As though that makes it normal. Perhaps it does.  
  
After some more staring into the kitchen cupboards and at the many, _many_ Internet finds of questionable quality, Linda walks out of her house and sets her GPS to find the nearest church.  
  
The worn wooden bench soothes her body, the silence feels like a warm caress against her raging thoughts. As the daughter of a Lutheran priest and a wildly agnostic teacher Linda finds it ironic that she’s in this position. Or maybe it’s all part of that plan her favorite client likes to nag about. Or maybe, just _maybe_ , it’s one of those improbable and pretty wondrous things that life has in store for you. A random occurrence that she can choose to roll with or choose to run screaming from.  
  
As it turns out, Linda Martin is not one to opt for the latter.  
  
She smiles into the bright, colorful paintings of angels and remembers how she’d always ask about everyone depicted, growing up. Who was she, what did he do, what’s with that hair? And her father would answer, spin a good story even when there wasn’t one to be found. Her father who for as long as he lived would remind her that the whole point of God isn’t the concept of sin, or hell or even avoiding anything - _the reason for everything is love, Linda. You are loved. So loved. That's all you need to know about God._ _  
__  
_ Over the years, her doubts come and go but her father remains a beacon. _  
_  
Yeah, this will be _fine_ , Linda decides, arranges her hands in her lap and prays, casually, like her father taught her.  
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
It _is_ fine, _surprisingly_ fine, especially once Lucifer invites her over to his place for a very long dinner that continues into the morning and gives Linda unlimited opportunity to ask everything she can think of about Hell and Heaven. He sits perched in an armchair opposite her while she drinks and eats and _asks_. He talks. Tells her that he slept with Shakespeare, that Marie Antoinette is in Hell and that Linda would be surprised to learn how many religious figureheads that now holds their very own cells in his kingdom. She isn’t. He’s a good sport, generous and honest, self-deprecating and sharp and delightfully sarcastic. In other words: he’s Lucifer. Devil or not.  
  
“Wow,” she says when daylight falls in squares over her bare legs that are outstretched and over his face that looks even more appealing than usual with a softness that has crept into it now that the secret is out. Smoothed out like this he is almost completely irresistible even to someone who has sworn herself to eternal abstinence as far as he’s concerned. They claim there's a market for bad guys but what you want isn’t the possibility to get hurt by a cruel man, what you _want_ is the reformation, the gift of being privy to someone's gentler sides. What you want lies beneath the surface, _always_ , and he proves it better than any textbook example.  
  
_Oh_ , she thinks. _Tell Chloe, too._  
  
“Thank you, Linda,” he says, smiling briefly in that unflinchingly _honest_ way he has. The one that she personally thinks would be even more successful with people than the seductive routine. He looks so grateful that she’s here. She realizes that she is, as well. “For not running away.”  
  
“Hey, we’re friends, _Satan_.” She returns his smile. “I’ve got the dark lord on my side.”  
  
Lucifer chuckles under his breath, snapping back into his regular persona. “I’m not Voldemort, Doctor. I’d never invent something as bloody stupid as the horcruxes, for one thing.”  
  
Linda laughs out loud, the wine spinning in her body.

\--- 

  
  
She regrets a handful of friendships in her life. It’s a luxury she gives herself, the indulgence to allow herself to go back through memories, to regret certain people, certain choices.  
  
Lana, back when they were nine or ten and Linda would go out of her way to impress the girl next door who also, incidentally, was the most popular girl in their class. Cruel like most high-ranking kids, insecure and vengeful. Enter Linda who had been persistently devoid of any self-restraint when it came to her need for affiliation. Yeah, she regrets that, those painful years of pining over a friend that never wanted her.  
  
Joshua in high school who had acted like a friend but wanted to be her boyfriend and who, when she turned him down, broke down and called her all sorts of nasty names. She had felt betrayed to her core, had not been able to stop thinking about all the secrets they shared, all the silly things she had told him when she considered him a close confidante and how they were unsafe with him now, how he’d use them against her. And he had, of course. Teenage boys and wounded male egos and all that jazz.  
  
Brenda in college, during the Dark Ages of drugs, irresponsible sexual behavior and a _frighteningly_ weak superego. While Linda shoulders the blame for all of it, the introduction of drugs had been on Brenda. And, more often, the questionable guys that came and went to their studio apartment.   
  
She _lets_ herself regret that. A professional recommendation from herself to herself, as good as they come.   
  
And here, in this room where everything is blinding white spots of pain and terror and that time she spent half-awake on the floor of her practice thinking she would die, that they would all die and it would be her fault. Here some regret slips in effortlessly through the cracks in reality that comes with fighting - or _not_ fighting - a celestial force. She even remembers wondering who’d greet her down in Hell what with its King up and about in L.A, trying to recollect enough of what Lucifer had told her to imagine how her cell would be designed, what her loop would be. Well, she _knows_ what her loop would be: Brenda and her behind the wheels, increasingly blurry vision, increasingly loud music, bottles passed on between the six people they had crammed into the car and then tree, crash, _darkness_. Five casualties. When Linda woke up in the ER her life was another life, a life _after_ , and she was a different person. Eventually a _better_ one but still.  
  
She wonders if they make her share a Hell-cell with Brenda as a form of extra punishment. Now wouldn’t that be something.  
  
It makes her smile darkly to herself now. Deflecting unbearable pain with humor is a strong mechanism after all. One of the more ingenious designs of the human brain. The man who frets about in her room knows all about that. In fact she’d say he’s probably invented it somehow. He’s all about deflection and guilt. Mountains upon mountains of guilt that he carries with him everywhere.  
  
He’s also soft hands and averted gazes that try to look at her to estimate the damage done but he can’t bring himself to meet her eyes or sit down for more than a couple of seconds; she’s drugged into a sweet but also half-delirious _shame_ that tickles her brain into thinking she’s embarrassed herself for having tried to stand up to the goddess of all creation.  
  
What a pair they make tonight.  
  
_I don’t regret you, Lucifer_ , she thinks sentimentally from her hospital bed. _I’ll never regret you. You're_ so _worth it._  
  
The tears that form in his eyes reveal that she might just have spoken the words out loud in her drug-induced state and while it makes her cheeks flush she also thinks _oh well, he needs to hear it anyway_ and when he presses his lips chastely to her sore forehead, she closes her eyes and breathes him in.  
  
“Thank you,” he says in that low, honest voice she almost never hears in therapy. Not yet. They’ll get there, she promises herself now. Oh, the devil won’t know what hit him. “Thank you, Linda.”  
  
“Well, thank _you_. For not letting your mother destroy humanity.”  
  
Finally he smiles. A quick, sad smile. “You’re quite welcome.”

* * *

  
  
  
Azrael stands in the Mojave desert, awaiting the dying soul that will soon emerge from a pile of sand in the distance. She used to remember the names of the dead, back when the population of Earth was scarce and she felt a familiarity with them. It had been a point of pride, one that she had thought Lu would like. A little twist to the task, a small adjustment.  
  
Now she’s lost in all the names, all the faces, all the deaths.  
  
She sees the light like a pillar through the sky and thinks for a confusing moment that it’s the soul she’s going to take but it’s too strong for a human, too powerful. It is, by all means, a divine light.  
  
A divine light coming from angelic wings that try to take flight while the angel in possession of them is knocked out, wasting away, scorching in the heat. Azrael kneels in the sand, shields the body with her own wings and places her hands over it. _Not losing you again, you big dope_.  
  
Heartbeats increasing, lungs drawing breath, she removes her powers from his, afraid to wake him up before she gets out of sight. She still has no words for the fact that she hasn’t spoken to him in all these years, the shame blocking her throat so efficiently that there will be no dramatic encounters, no heavenly choirs or reenactments of the story of the prodigal son. Or the prodigal angels. Or the not very prodigal angel of death and her devil of a brother.  
  
Who doesn’t look much like a devil at all right now, his white wings golden in the sun and that shining light inside him from _before_ burning under his skin.  
  
“Oh Lu, what did you do now?” she mumbles, brushing sand from his face.

* * *

An inconclusive list of things that Chloe Jane Decker wishes she could give up on, preferably for good:  
  
  
1\. Nightly worry-marathons about the future. Trixie’s future, her future, the future of her house, her car, the world. It leads exactly nowhere except to terrible mornings. She’s a practical, level-headed kind of woman so nobody knows that she spends a serious amount of time fretting around like an idiot over long-term decision and domino effects and god knows what else. Well, Dan knows to a certain extent, having shared a home with her. Lucifer knows, to a much larger extent, though she isn’t sure _how_. All she knows is that he sends her texts with instructions of the _watch a movie, drink a glass of wine_ -kind when they’ve had one of _those_ days. That he sends over both movies and wine bottles if she seems particularly unwilling. That he, in all his overbearing and somewhat tone-deaf care, books spa weekends for her that she hands away to Ella or her mom or whiskey tasting nights that she attends, mostly. She wishes that he’d come to her place, instead. Not bringing anything but himself, talking to her or quipping his way through a silly movie by her side, just generally being in her company. _That_ sort of care she wants so much it breaks something inside her if she thinks about it for too long.  
  
  
2\. The sandwiches at the precinct. Lucifer _is_ right about those and she _will_ most likely suffer a bout of salmonella in a not so distant future. But giving those up means investing time in learning how to cook. She’s not ready for that. But she's also not ready to become her mother with her catered dinner parties that she hosts with a messy kitchen to make it look genuine. Solution: avoid dinner parties. ~~Or have Lucifer cook.~~  
  
  
3\. Lucifer Morningstar as a potential lover. Even more so as a potential boyfriend. And she does give this up, frequently. And then she doesn’t - _again_ \- because how could she?

* * *

  
  
  
  
When they first meet, Trixie decides that Lucifer is _weird_.  
  
Not grown-up weird like grandma or mom when she’s around grandma or some of her mom’s cop friends or weird like dad sometimes when he says one thing and Trixie _knows_ it’s not what he’s actually thinking but he’s still being all serious about it. His face gets wobbly then. Like the words he wants to say are trying to find their way out.  
  
But Lucifer is not like that; he’s weird in his very own way and there's no one like him.   
  
There’s good-weird, like when he tells her to eat chocolate cake if she really wants to or when he shows her a coin that seems to spin in a way that no coin could spin and then just grins at her when she looks at him, teeth flashing and eyes sparkling. He’s like a kid then, full of pranks that her teachers would hate and that Trixie secretly would love.  
  
Good-weird when he tells her about places she’s sure can’t exist but he claims they do and says _I never lie, small human_ and Trixie decides she believes him. She can tell because school is all about who’s lying and who’s not and you always _know_.  
  
Good-weird when he makes her snort soda out of her nostrils laughing at all the strange things he tells her, when he raids their cupboards for snacks and lets her eat it in front of the TV.  
  
There’s bad-weird, too, but she never sees any of it, just hears daddy talk about it and his voice is annoyed then, like mommy’s when Trixie sneaks up past bedtime or calls grandma to tell her she’s got a babysitter again. She overhears words she doesn’t properly understand but mom is whispering - _hissing_ \- and dad is frowning.  
  
“If you truly want something,” Lucifer tells her once, slumped on their kitchen chair while he waits for mom to get ready. “You should have it. What’s the harm?”  
  
Trixie ponders it for a second. “People get angry.”  
  
“True, I suppose.”  
  
“And maybe… disappointed?” That’s her mom’s favorite word when she catches Trixie doing things, her favorite word that sounds so harsh even if mom uses her bedtime story voice. _Sweetheart I’m so disappointed in you_ and Trixie just wants to run away from her gaze then, wants everything to just stop but it won’t, not until she apologizes and even then she can see the traces of it in mom’s face, the remains of disapproval. What’s the point of saying sorry if it doesn’t change anything? She thinks she could maybe ask Lucifer, some time. He would answer.   
  
Now Lucifer raises an eyebrow, watching her. “That’s no way to live, urchin. Under the spell of everyone else’s potential disapproval. Sounds like something my father would like and _ugh-_ ” He makes a grimace and drinks from his glass of what she thinks is Diet Coke except smells funny and strong. Trixie is never allowed to have it unless it’s the weekend but mom hadn’t said anything when Lucifer poured them drinks before and the unexpected mischief still lingers in her body.  
  
She laughs. She can’t imagine Lucifer having a father, definitely not a father who makes him do things he doesn’t want to do. But then again moms and dads have parents and they tend to act super weird around them so Lucifer probably does, too.  
  
“Is your dad a magician, too?”  
  
“A magician?” He sounds like he’s laughing inside; his face is all bright light and sparkles. “ _Oh_ , yes. Yes, I suppose he is. You should definitely tell him that when you meet him.”  
  
“Okay.” She nods and drinks. Her Coke tastes amazing, better than anything she’s ever had maybe except for those huge milkshakes dad buys for her when they go to the movies and he winks and says _this is our little secret, munchkin_. “When do I meet him?”  
  
“At some point. If you’re lucky, that is. If by _lucky_ you mean 'keen on experiencing extreme boredom'.” He shrugs. “But this is all many, many years from now. Though you never know with the way you humans pollute this planet-”  
  
“Okay, you two. That’s enough for tonight.” Mom has her arms folded across her chest and then Lucifer smiles at her in a completely different way than he smiles at Trixie - or anyone, probably. He _beams_ , like a little star. Or a very tall star. She wonders if mom sees that, too.

\---  
  
  
  
Things get more complicated after that, Trixie notices. Everything’s more _serious_ and Maze and Lucifer frown at each other, talking about blades and Hell and Trixie wants to know if she could help in any way.  
  
“It’s best if you don’t,” Lucifer says, after what looks like serious consideration.  
  
“Mama Decker will kill us,” Maze adds, running a finger across her throat for effect and Trixie grins, even if she feels left out and it’s worse than being left out in school because it’s _Maze_ who lets her watch horror movies until she starts to cry and talks about sex with her.  
  
That’s why she loves Lucifer, too - oh she does, she _adores_ him and his grumpy hugs. Loves his awesome car and his stories and how he sneaks candy and cash into the pockets of her schoolbag, laughs about horrible things to make them seem less horrible and how he always seems to make mom a little less worried. But most of all she loves that he never thinks anything is strange. Grown-ups always do but he doesn't. She knows that if she told him that she’s really a green unicorn called Marc, Lucifer wouldn’t ever make a fuss about it, he’d just nod and say _ah, very well then_ and remember to call her Marc next time he’d use her name.   
  
It makes her grin, thinking about it.  
  
It seems to make mom grin, too, until it suddenly doesn’t and Trixie hopes Lucifer hasn’t done something really bad because then Trixie would have to side with mom.  
  
Not that there’s anything _wrong_ with mom but it just seems like any side where Lucifer is, is the better one.

* * *

Chloe dates Pierce and everything is _wrong_.  
  
But then so much has been wrong for a long, long time and she’s tired of having her heart stomped on, tired of pining, of hoping. She gives so many chances, too many chances, and the best Lucifer can muster up is some half-assed idea of friendship. _I don’t want to be your friend_ , she screams to him in her head. _I want your fancy British tongue inside my body and your fancy Italian three-piece suits in my wardrobe how hard can it be to understand this?_ _  
_  
Lucifer, apparently, gives Pierce his blessing to start dating her. Pierce tells her this without actually telling her this and Chloe cries stupidly in the shower, then swears it is the last time Lucifer will make her cry. It just _has_ to be, she’s afraid he’s wearing down her affection and acceptance the way things are going and she doesn’t want to lose him, can’t stand the thought.  
  
So, enter Pierce.  
  
At least Pierce is a solid presence in her life. He shows up on time, he is is _there_ , he reciprocates when she makes out with him and keeps his arm around her waist when they walk together outside. He’s not half as easy to talk to as Lucifer, doesn’t have a fraction of his humor, filthy mind or wild associations but he’s dryly funny, hard-working and ordinary. All good things.  
  
It’s not exactly love but she’s a thirty-five year old single mother, the time for rose-tinted illusions is long gone. 

It’s not exactly love, but it’s some kind of romance full of flowers and not-so-sneaky meetings at work which actually isn’t half as thrilling as Ella seems to think because Chloe on her end thinks _I’m turning into my mom, it’s actually happening_ and she remembers that Lucifer once promised her the opposite, that he once averted that exact thing.  
  
There’s entirely too much Lucifer in her relationship with Marcus - she practices using his first name, in her head he’s always Pierce - and she tells herself it’s because he’s the one that got away. That’s something her mother would say, too, about lost loves. _Beware the ones that get away, they never truly do_. Again with her mother. Chloe winces into the glass of wine that Marcus just served her and pretends to think about him instead.  
  
“Nice… aftertaste,” she says. Everything she knows about wine she’s picked up from Lucifer.  
  
“Nice... _dress_ ,” Marcus says and then, thankfully, they don’t have to find things to talk about for a while. 

* * *

  
  
  
  
Things turn messy and then worse and then _everything_ hurts.  
  
Trixie hears too much, sees too much and Maze, _oh_ , Maze _hurts_.

* * *

  
  
  
  
Life on Earth, Maze finally understands, is nothing more than a painful, exhausting study in the art of losing people.  
  
She loses Amenadiel already when she has him in her arms because he thinks that she’s corrupted him. He’d never say it - he isn’t _Lucifer_ \- but a little sliver of him believes that she is part of his fall. Filthy, dirty little demon that she is. Good riddance, she tells herself and thinks about the feather she wasted on his self-righteous ass.   
  
She loses Linda, which makes her want to stab out her own eyes. Loses Linda to Amenadiel, which is so fucking absurd and horrible that Maze destroys all her training dummies in one workout when she finds out. Slashes them to pieces, stomps on them, kicks, hits, ramming into them with fists and knuckles and teeth.  
  
She loses Dan, it might just be for the best but even so there’s a glint in his eyes sometimes that makes her feel less alone in this shithole of a city so she will miss him, she thinks. Miss him like the rest even if none of them deserve her.  
  
She loses Trixie. This makes her feel like her rib cage is breaking, like she’s drank fire from pits of hell. In her memory she shows the little human her demon face not only once but again and _again_ and Trixie touches it with fingers that smell of sugar and soap and Maze draws sharp breaths each time because it feels like someone’s touching her _heart_ and nothing has ever felt like that before. Trixie’s eyes go wide and soft. _So cool_ , she says and Maze makes her promise not to tell anyone, trusts her not to.  
  
She loses Lucifer, too, in the end. Or she loses him before this, to his burning self-hatred that makes him blind to everything else. Or she never really _had_ him. That option feels like hell-forged blades in her veins so she pushes it away with another blow, another mistake, another damn vicious circle of the Hell she belongs to.  
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
Amenadiel's body always carries deep, dark notes - earth, wood, stone - and he always smells so damn nice. Always _is_ so damn nice, too, which makes it so difficult. Maze holds him tight, the betrayal shivering in her hand, thinking Linda can do better as a way of encouraging herself but it fails, it fails spectacularly.  
  
“I will always be here for you,” he says and Maze thinks _thank you_ , thinks _forgive me_ , thinks _I’m turning into Lucifer_ and then she thinks of the actual Lucifer and his eyes when she told him she played those mind-games on him, thinks of the actual Linda with her sensible opinions and her wicked drunk laughter and Trixie who makes her entire body hurts with regret.  
  
She runs. She runs over her own almost-defeat, over dead thug-bodies and this stupid city that she hates so much that she realizes she has begun to love it.  
  
It’s not too late because Linda is unharmed.   
  
It’s not too late because Linda forgives her, tells her it's okay, that she's strong and she _is_.   
  
Maze weeps into her apple-scented hair like a messed-up, heartbroken fucking human and it’s not too late and nothing else _matters_.

* * *

  
  
  
Contrary to popular belief, Ella Lopez isn’t a cheerful Catholic nerd who runs on pep and CSI-gore and sugary coffee drinks.  
  
Well, she is and she isn’t. Most importantly she’s a _lot_ of other things, as well, and one of the few people who truly realizes that is Lucifer. From the very first one-sided hug she shares with him, he’s had her number. She likes him instantly, loves him like a brother. A more handsome, less criminal version. He understands her instinctively, catches hold of so many of her erratic trains of thought and seems delighted rather than annoyed with the depths of her vast geek knowledge.  
  
It only seems fair that she gets to figure him out as well.   
  
And she does, in bits and pieces and secrecy. Two steps forward and one step back, downing a few drinks and reciting a few prayers along the way because _whoa_.  
  
Ordinary day and they save an ex-wife from an abusive man about to throw her out of a window at a hotel and Ella goes through the footage from the scene, flicking back and forth. Lucifer had been the first to enter the room and the one to pull Jessica Richmond back from a certain death and nothing about that adds up. _I was a lucky devil_ , Lucifer had stated, brushing his hands down his jacket and avoiding further questions by leaping into a verbal argument with Dan over pudding.  
  
Lucky devil my ass, Ella thinks, flicking back to the most absurd photo again.  
  
The photo where it actually looks, bar a few really far-fetched explanations that she goes over ten times to exclude them from her theory, like Lucifer is _flying_.  
  
Then comes the fact that she sees him take a few bullets - without any gear, without any LAPD tricks whatsoever because they’re in _Vegas_ and she got dressed with him for their silly musical number so she would know. He just stands there shrugging off being shot at and it shatters her brain for a second but when she pieces it together again and adds it to the footage of Lucifer mid-air, something clicks darkly in her head.  
  
“Nice shot,” he tells her appreciatively when Ella fires her gun into the bartender’s leg and all she can think is _¡Ay, Dios Mío!_ _You are not human, are you buddy?_ On the way home she sees the hole in his shirt but pretends that she hasn’t. All the way back, singing through the songs he shuffles on his phone, she thinks about angels, about miracles, about ghosts. She isn't crazy. It's happening again but she isn't crazy.   
  
The following week she super studies Lucifer’s every movement to catch another one of those things that nothing can properly explain but gets zero weirdness. Same thing the week after that. Ella backs a little, reconsiders. She’s probably just watched too many supernatural TV-shows, slept too little, worked too hard.  
  
Then there’s the whole business with Charlotte Richards - the new amnesia version that lacks the weird but also extremely _comforting_ light that Charlotte Richards used to have just right under her skin. Ella is pretty sure nobody saw it but her, well, maybe apart from Lucifer who had spent a lot of time with - _no way_. Or - way.   
  
Her head spins. She tries to avoid Charlotte but that’s damn well impossible when Charlotte decides that she’s going on a redemptive path which - _hello_ , associations and signs that Ella actually doesn’t want. For the first time in her life she doesn’t want more signs of anything divine. No ghosts, no lights seeping out from behind people’s contours, no method acting madness that might just actually _not_ be acting.   
  
Her corner of the universe is becoming too scary. If anything, she would like some proof that the atheists are right. That the ghost she’s seen since she was a child, the voices in her head, the inexplicable things that keeps happening no matter where she turns are just figments of her own imagination and can be explained away with science.  
  
She drinks, goes to church, _prays_. Copes in her own ways and decides that this time nobody is going to let her think that she’s crazy.  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
And then everything breaks and Ella is _done_.  
  
When things have gone to shit and Pierce is dead, Ella takes three sick days in a row, goes out of town and turns off her phone. Then she finds a church - a Protestant church, not that it matters, not now - and sinks down on her knees in it, crying as she tells the God that has saved her life so many times, saved her sanity, her heart, her soul, that she quits.   
  
"We're _done_ , big guy. I'll let you know if I change my mind. I want to, but... You're just hurting me right now. Makes me think I'm - and I'm not. I'm _not_ crazy. Yeah? I'm sorry. Take care of my family, please. Amen."   
  
The necklace burns in her pocket when she takes it off so she shoves in into a drawer at her work desk instead, once she returns to the precinct like nothing happened.   
  
Nothing _happened_. No ghosts, no angels, no devils. We're the responsible parties, Lucifer had said and she agrees with that, always has, even when she was religious. Which was, like, yesterday. Still. That's the truth. Humans are the responsible parties and a responsible party has the right to call it quits at any time, right? Nothing new under the sun.   
  
Ella carries on with her life and puts on a smile; with Chloe gone, Dan grieving and Lucifer not answering any of her texts there's no one there to really say if the smile is fake or not. 

* * *

  
  
  
  
Lucifer tells her that he’s the Devil. That his father threw him out of Heaven, that he has served as the ruler of Hell for an eternity, that he’s quit, that he couldn’t be that man anymore, that he’s here on Earth but still the Devil, Satan, the prince of lies himself.  
  
And Chloe isn’t stupid. She knows there’s something _there_ , something bitter and twisted in what he says.  
  
Over the years she's gone through all the phases. She’s wanted to understand, then wanted to give him the benefit of a doubt, then wanted to dissect his person blood sample by weird criminal encounter, one thing at the time, until she’s found an answer to everything that rests just out of her reach. His physical strength, his inhuman capacity for drugs and booze, his mind-game mojo that Amenadiel claims is just a psychological trick and Lucifer claims is a divine power and neither of those explanations explain why it doesn’t work on Chloe. Of course she’s wanted to deduct and analyse, come to a verdict. Then she’s spent too much time with him and thought no it doesn’t really matter because he is who he is and she likes him. _Loves_ him. Oh, so much more than she can admit even to herself.   
  
She’s landed where it makes sense. That he’s a complex, wounded person that tries his best at being high-functioning - and he gets better at it, she sees progress, she really does - because he truly wants to be a better person. That he already is a pretty damn good person as he is, not that he can see that himself but Chloe can. Oh, she can. She sees his light and his humor, his selflessness and his open-minded acceptance of others. His strive for justice and fairness, his hatred of oppression of any kind. She sees that so much that it blinds her.   
  
Lucifer _tells_ her.  
  
She doesn't believe him. Doesn’t _want_ to believe him. Really, why should she?  
  
She decides that yeah, he probably has a criminal record. It’s probably bad if he’s erased his entire past over it. And she’s a cop and she knows better or should know better but he’s here, and he’s kind and sweet and funny and he’s working so hard, _so_ hard at righting wrongs that she is willing to let that go.  
  
And then she sees him, hunched over Pierce’s corpse like a wild animal. A beast, tasting blood.  
  
She thinks about Trixie, thinks about how she’s fallen asleep in his arms, how _Trixie_ has fallen asleep in his arms, how she’s brushed dark curls out of his forehead when he’s been the one doing the sleeping and thought _how can a grown man be so beautiful_ and now all that she can think about is that he’s the Devil.  
  
She stares at him, stares at his face long after the red charred skin has disappeared and her mouth opens without words coming out of it and Lucifer looks at her like his heart has shattered at her feet. Like _he_ has the right to be shocked when he’s the Devil.  
  
“Detective,” he says and he sounds the same but he’s the beast with Pierce’s blood all over his hands. Or is it blood? Is it blood or just the horrible burnt skin of the creature he is. “ _Chloe_.”  
  
And it’s all true and it’s all a lie and she can’t _breathe_.


	2. The minor fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rome is ancient and it devastates her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the comments and kudos on this! I got even wordier than I thought when I drafted this story so I expect the final story to be 4 or 5 chapters.

  
  
_Let’s admit, without apology, what we do to each other._  
_We know who our enemies are. We know._  
Detail of the Fire - Richard Siken  
  
  
* * *

  
  
  
**III -** _ **the minor fall** __  
_  
  
Amenadiel sets her down gently on a green slope right outside the Gates.  
  
Changing the harsh darkness of her death scene to the warm lights of the Silver City feels _just_ , a warm certainty at the pit of his stomach where his faith pools, renewed and _passionate_ , the way it used to be. Or never quite the way it _used_ to be, not after his fall. The notes are all new, a different tune altogether. The previous version of him would never have broken the rules like this, for instance, would not have prayed to Azrael as he flew - _I’ve got this one, special circumstances_ \- simply because he would not have been privy to any special circumstances.  
  
He would not have shed tears over a single human soul.   
  
Looking at said soul who has rested in his arms he feels grateful and humble, a swirl of emotions that has no clear direction. She had saved his life. A human had died for _him_. He still cannot fathom it so he pauses, shifts focus.  
  
“It’s so nice to meet you again, Charlotte,” he says and takes the hand of the woman who was never really their mother, though it somehow felt that way. Odd as it initially had been to adjust his image of Mom to fit the body of a beautiful, ungodly lawyer with a sharp tongue and an even sharper mind. Well, those last two things had not been much of a transition, he supposes. “And we will meet many times yet.”  
  
“Good.” She smiles, peaceful in a way he’s never seen her before. They settle quickly here, not like the confused desperation of the wayward souls down in Hell. He recalls his shift there with an acrid taste forming at the back of his tongue. “I must say - I’m grateful for, well, _everything_ you and your brother did. I never got the chance to thank Lucifer - oh, but I don’t suppose - _oh_.”  
  
A flutter of sadness in her expression as it sinks in, the full depth and scope of what they had revealed to her. The meaning of it all.  
  
“Yeah,” Amenadiel confirms. “Lucifer is not… welcome here.”  
  
“What would happen if he arrived? Are there restraining orders for angels?” She smiles but the bothered look on her face remains. Heaven has won a sharp-witted prosecutor, he thinks, and a true champion. Earth will sorely miss her.  
  
“Well,” Amenadiel looks out over the beauty of Heaven. “To the best of my knowledge he hasn’t returned since Father banished him. So I cannot say.”  
  
This past year, becoming close to Linda and Charlotte, interacting with humans in honesty, he has begun to hear the oddities in his own stories, the explanations he offers. How foreign they must sound to human ears, how rigid and callous. Lucifer had smoothly slipped into that understanding a long time ago, adopting more adequate language, toning down his celestial weapon turned King of Hell personality. The downsides, Amenadiel supposes, is that the rift between his roles will appear that much greater for those that happen to see it. _He's so open_ _and approachable_ , Linda had told him once, a long time ago now before they tore down all the defenses between them. _Nothing like… well, you._ He had not minded the verdict; it's not his nature to be human.  
  
“It doesn’t seem fair,” Charlotte says. “Not that I could claim to possess any expertise but… hey, if I got here _he_ really should. He’s a good man.”  
  
He can’t disagree with that. Certainly not from her perspective and he has begun to think he cannot much question it from his own, either. Not without questioning himself, at least. Lucifer has never been evil - the idea that he would be is a punishment in itself - but reckless, arrogant, _intemperent_. Human flaws magnified to fit angelic scales. _Oh, Father. If you will not speak to me, at least speak to him. My faith has always been stronger._   
  
“Not sure he wants to,” he says instead because that, at least, he can speak of with some amount of authority.  
  
Charlotte exhales and lets her gaze fall on something in the distance here in the place that will be her home for eternity now. He hopes that she won’t feel lonely, that the brief moment of time that passes before she will be reunited with her loved ones will be bearable.  
  
“Being in Hell broke my heart,” she says very quietly, as though she’s sensing his thoughts. “I… it’s going to sound crazy, perhaps - especially considering how I jumped with joy at the chance to get back to my old ways afterwards. But seeing your brother’s wings-” Her voice trails off.  
  
“It healed you,” Amenadiel fills in, softly. “It restored your confidence in the goodness of the world. And yourself.”  
  
Her eyes widen slightly; a slow nod.  
  
“Again, thank you. Please tell Lucifer that, too. From me. When you see him again.”  
  
“I will.”  
  
“And tell Dan-” a small wince, her face crumbling. “Tell him the nightmare finally stopped. That I got out.”  
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
The Silver City is exactly the way he left it, the way he remembers it. Everything smells the same, tastes the same; Remiel even greets him in the manner he has always pictured she would. Reserved, cordial, warrior-like. His favorite sister and protege yet their gestures betray no such thing. _No humanity in the City of Servitude, now truly, brother I am shocked!_ _  
__  
_ He thinks about Linda’s warm welcomes, thinks about Daniel’s easy friendship, thinks about Lucifer who nods at him across the piano then nods towards the bar. _Help yourself to a drink, brother. Or five, to get you loosened up._ Lucifer who sets him up with an apartment, a wardrobe - _trust me, you do not want to be mistaken for a homeless man in a dress, humans are not quite that tolerant, unfortunately_ \- and a bank account. Linda who takes him to museums, art exhibitions, poetry readings, churches; who sits beside him and watches his face as he reacts to everything, as though she cannot study him close enough. And Trixie, the small human child that had seen him in a dark time and eased his doubts with sheer innocence. He still remembers that with a smile. 

Humanity is a brief struggle against the inevitable. A quick rage against the dying of the light, as Lucifer had put it once. Not Samael, as he was. Not the revolutionary who fell or the Devil, seemingly unashamed by his own rage and debauchery, striving for the image humans have painted of him, as though he had wanted to prove a point. To Father, to himself. Bending the truths and the prayers until he could look himself in the mirror. No, the Lucifer in his mind now is the one he has nearly come to know the way humans know each other, without angelic egos and divine missions standing in the way, through witnessed hardships and breakthroughs.  
**  
** Humanity is a brief struggle but it’s a heartfelt and exciting one, full of twists and turns and unexpected wisdom along the way.  
  
The Silver City is created for angels. Overwrought, overwhelming, overbearing. Lucifer has been sneering about it since the beginning of human history, claimed they probably will make their world better, more interesting. _freer_ . Amenadiel might see it now. He might finally see it.  
**  
** He walks in familiar places, greets familiar faces and nothing here is home.  
  


* * *

Her collarbone hurts but nothing’s broken and they let her go with a handful of painkillers and some accompanying pitying glances because everyone’s a gossip and everyone knows.  
  
Not the thing that truly broke her heart but the rest of it. The killing of the lieutenant - _did you hear she was his fiancee no really, yeah they moved real fast_ \- and the betrayal of said lieutenant - _some big crime boss, imagine that, he was always a weird son of a bitch_ \- and how it all went down with a trap leading to a massive shooting. So many injured.

“They are not dead,” Lucifer had said to the cops and EMTs storming the building. “Pierce is. The rest have injuries of varying degrees."  
  
He had said it with a seriousness in his voice and a presence that made her look up from her own shaking hands.  
  
He had spoken it like a confession of his crimes.  
  
He’s the _devil_ .  
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
Her mother waits at home, says Trixie is taking a nap _that’s okay isn’t, she’s had a rough day_ -  
  
“It’s okay mom,” Chloe says and steps into her embrace, the shooting and its aftermath still residing in her body, making it unstable. “Of course it is. This is - it’s been a really bad week.”

Or year, more like it.  
  
“Oh, sweetie.” Mom holds her tighter, her hands warm and gentle along Chloe’s spine, her perfume a light cloud of spices or flowers - Chloe’s never been good at identifying components of scents or tastes, it’s a running joke between Ella and -  
  
Lucifer who isn’t _human_.  
  
She swallows.  
  
For a moment, half-awake and in pain - both of them, she thinks, they had _both_ been in pain but he had not been shot - she could have sworn they were flying. She had looked up into his face, haloed by the sun itself and thought _you’re not human, you’ve told me all along_ and it had felt strangely okay, something snapping into place at the back of her mind. His face so bright then, a slice of light and warmth, of - her brain had made a somersault at the foreign concept - divinity.  
  
She had almost told Ella and Dan over the phone - I survived because he's an angel, an _angel_ \- would have, if that shooting hadn’t interrupted her.  
  
_Lucifer_ , she had thought and not cared what danger she was walking into.  
  
It feels like the worst part, her willingness to play the fool. It’s Palmetto all over again with Dan knowing, _knowing_ the entire time that she wasn’t losing her mind, that she wasn’t _overreacting_ like they told her, all the pompous middle-aged men behind their desks. _Gotta stay level-headed, Decker_ like she’s a frigging child. 

It’s Lucifer all over again, telling her he's not worth it only to make her fall so deeply in love with him that there's no damn end to it, even now. Then running away as soon as it got too emotional, then approaching her again. And again. And _again_ but always with that distance between them, those safety measures that she used to think was for him, to keep an exit open. Now she doesn’t even know what it was for, what it had _been_. Years of her life that she has treasured despite all the heartache and uncertainty, all twisted and broken now that she's seen the truth. 

It’s Marcus all over again, stupid Chloe walking into a trap because she's so starved and pathetic, so naive in love, so shitty at relationships, _not getting any younger_ and such an easy prey.

She's done being made fun of.  
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
“You know what,” her mother says later when they’ve sat for half an hour with their plates full of fried rice and spring rolls without eating much. Trixie is already off to bed, again. “I think you should get away for awhile. Take Trixie travelling. Let me cover the expenses.”  
  
“Yeah, I’d love to but I’ve got work-”  
  
“C _hloe_. Don’t be like your father.” Her tone shifts, her facial expression softens a little and Chloe suddenly remembers arguments, remembers increasingly resigned voices from the bedroom next to hers. _The world will still rotate even if John Decker takes a few days off_. She had forgotten. “Do something for yourself, just this once. Think about _you_ .”  
  
So she does.  
  
For once, she does.  
  
It’s ironic how badly that goes, in the end.  
  


* * *

They have a few moments over the years, sure.  
  
The guy has done some really admirable stuff, pulled stunts no one else could even think of, taken bullets for the team and saved Chloe's life more than once. Yeah, he'll vouch for that.  
  
But in the big picture - and Dan likes to think he’s a big picture kind of guy - Lucifer Morningstar has been causing more trouble and suffering that he’s _ever_ done good.  
  
It’s easy to hate him.  
  
He enters, from nowhere, with _hidden agenda_ written all over his spoiled playboy looks. Dan does his research, talks to his contacts, pulls all the threads back to the guy’s past. Nothing. Even when ‘nothing’ is _obviously_ not the case - how could it be? But he can’t find anything to show for his efforts unless you count a dent in his own self-confidence for being the kind of guy that does research on his ex-wife’s new work partner. It’s a pathetic place to be so he blames it on Lucifer’s douchey car, his mountains of cash and his side-occupation as a nightclub owner. Definitely not good signs as far as your moral fiber goes.  
  
Not that he’s one to talk. And that infuriates him even more. His own shitty position made even shittier by his lack of judgement. The way Chloe had looked at him when he told her the sordid truth - even leaving out a few details of the origin of it all, the first few temptations way back when - and something in her gaze had faded, been shut off. They’d been so close to getting back together at that point, hadn’t they? But he knew in the moment he confessed, that it would never happen.  
  
_You don’t get to be sorry._

Nobody agrees with that assessment more than Dan. 

Sometimes he thinks Lucifer of all people could understand that about him. That cruel bully inside his head - _you can stop trying Espinoza, you'll never be good enough; just give up, give in_ \- pushing and punishing in equal amounts.  
  
The way Chloe had goddamn _looked_ at him.  
  
And the way Chloe looks at Lucifer, a blow deep inside Dan's gut, the all too familiar way in which her eyes go dark and soft at the same time. Years into their partnership and she still holds his gaze, still smiles intimately at inside jokes, still makes it all about this strange rich dude who could have had her a hundred times but keeps running off, marrying strippers, going off the radar and fucking the rest of LA instead. He hurts her deliberately and repeatedly and she stands there, _taking_ it. Sure, Dan has no right to be sorry but does Lucifer? _Really_ ?   
  
Despite all this Lucifer grows on him the way he grows on them all. The precinct’s delighted by his every move and Dan even _likes_ him a lot of the time, figures a guy with a brother as decent as Amenadiel can’t be all bad, family’s got to count for something. But he nurses no illusions: Lucifer is exactly like the loaded white jocks in high school who could bullshit their way through school, treat girls however they wanted, piss off teachers and skip class and still make it to the damn Ivy League because in the end it's always about money and who you know. _Well of course it is, Detective Douche,_ Lucifer sneers in his head with that posh accent a little extra crisp whenever Dan imagines it, an added flavor of condescension. _What else would it be about when you have created such a wonderfully corrupt system? Kudos to you lot._ _  
_  
Lucifer, walking around like he knows best, better than experience and years of training and hard work. Lucifer who doesn’t even _know_ hard work, who probably comes from a long line of British lords or whatever, with armies of people wiping their butts and polishing their Corvettes.  
  
Lucifer, going at it alone, keeping things from everyone and messing everything up so fucking badly that it gets people hurt.  
  
Lucifer who gets Charley killed. He _knows_ this is a stretch but he doesn't care. It's just another thing that adds up. Everything about him is a red flag, an obvious temptation held up before him and God help him but Dan falls for it with his eyes wide open, takes easy where he can find it now that everything else has gone to hell.  
  
It’s easy to hate him because he _deserves_ to be hated.  
  
  
  
\---

They serve oysters and canapés with Russian caviar at Charlotte's funeral and her ex-husband is treated by the guests as the bereaved party. He is, of course, the father of her kids so it makes _sense_ but sense doesn’t matter in the face of grief. 

Dan stares at his plate, at his own hand holding it. It feels like an estranged body part. 

He has no freaking idea what to say to these people. It cuts into him, this fact that even if Charlotte had been alive their worlds would have been different ones, separated with airtight barriers that no waffles on Earth could have broken down in the end. Could they? Did they? A sudden embarrassment washes over him. He’s feels like the idiot from the wrong side of town, a side note in Charlotte’s existence and he is. He was. He should leave.  
  
Everyone is talking, conversations flowing back and forth. That’s the weird part about funerals, how it makes people talk. And eat. It’s pretty disgusting when you think about it, when your insides are knotted up with a pain that just won't go _away_ .  
  
Some toddlers are having a riot over at the cake table. An older kid with weird hair is overseeing the mess.  
  
Ella and Janet from their department are sitting by the entrance, consumed by what appears to be a serious conversation.   
  
And there’s a buzz coming from where Lucifer is standing; of _course_ there is. A woman Dan’s never seen before smiles, another woman leans close and there’s Doctor Martin, too, looking like she’s engaged in deeply riveting conversation. Their faces are solemn but not nearly sad enough for a funeral service, he thinks. Not nearly enough for Charlotte.  
  
It moves inside, the darkness that he’s barely managing to suppress, spins madly before it heads for the surface. 

And here Lucifer stands with some former law-firm associates, chats at length with Charlotte’s friends from school, with neighbors, with co-workers. Moves around in the broken pieces of her life like he has any _right_ .  
  
“She’s in Heaven,” he has the nerve to state and Dan thinks about punching him right over his mouth. A right hook to break his conceited smile that is probably intended to be well-meaning but isn't. It _can’t_ be. How can it be? How can _anything_ be?  
  
“She was an extraordinary woman,” he says smoothly to Charlotte’s mother who, naturally, fawns like a damn sycophant because it’s Lucifer Morningstar in a three-piece suit, with puppy dog eyes to fit the occasion. Even Dan isn’t indifferent to _that_ . “I’m sorry for your loss.”  
  
For someone who claimed he didn’t expect to attend the funeral, he sure acts like it’s a another damn show. 

"Have you heard from the Detective?" he asks eventually, when they have a moment to themselves, and Dan is fucking delighted to spot real emotion in his voice for once. A worried little edge, syllables that are just as vulnerable as Lucifer Morningstar never _is_ . Oh, this is a gift alright. A gift from a God Dan hasn’t believed in since he was a kid.  
  
"Yeah she calls every day." A tweaking of the truth for sure; she's called once and sent a bunch of photos of Trixie. "Why? She doesn't call you?"

Lucifer’s face falls and it lights a damn beacon of joy in Dan’s chest. It’s bitter and harsh, fueled by self-contempt more than anything else but it burns so sweetly. It makes him victorious, it makes him cruel.

"Look man, if she wanted to be in touch with you she would be in touch with you, you know?”  
  
“Indeed.” Lucifer nods, one of his hands running down his jacket rather nervously. The composure is gone, his prancing persona left wide-open for a moment of unadulterated pain that lands somewhere deep in Dan’s chest and he thinks _fuck_ , thinks _I’m sorry pal, that was harsh_ but when he looks up again, Lucifer is already gone. 

* * *

  
  
  
  
  
Berlin is hot and crowded and lovely and Trixie learns a few German words, delighted to order for herself at restaurants. Amsterdam is the prettiest city Chloe has ever seen, Trixie gushes over the canals and all the bikes and the narrow streets, the old houses that seem to bend around each other. They have desserts instead of dinner, drink soda and beer for lunch and walk, walk, walk everywhere.  
  
For their first week travelling through Europe, the pain eases a little bit.  
  
Then they reach Rome.  
  
Rome is ancient - _not as old as Lucifer_ she reminds herself and gets vertigo - and beautiful in the way European cities are. Every street, each district a quilt of patched up and restored, of old and new, mended and ruined. So many rulers, so many marks that history has left on it. It’s a city of war and churches and faith, of matters she has never considered before and wishes she didn’t have to consider now. She finds herself missing the clean, modern lines of LA, its artificial history and superficial glamour.

Rome is warm and old and haunting. 

There is nowhere to hide here once she reveals to the priests what she came to study and she regrets it even as she admits her purpose, feels remorse the moment his name spills from her lips. Every church she visits is the same - a judgement made out of cold, unforgiving stone - but the priests are calm and soft-spoken, they nod and sigh and touch her shoulder when she is about to fall. The discrepancy confuses her; the discrepancy soothes her. It’s like working a complex case: she brings the notes and the imperfect cell phone photos to the hotel at night, sits with her laptop in a windowsill in the dark room, trying to make sense of it all, writes notes for the notes, scores out, goes back and forth and lists thoughts, pros and cons for each theory.  
  
Outside her window in this city with all its saints and kings, all the angels and conquerors made immortal, it feels like something’s watching, breathing through the echoes of history.  
  
Rome is ancient and it devastates her. 

  
  
\---  
  
  
  
  
Chloe Jane Decker has always been _such_ a good girl.  
  
A responsible child, of course. Apple-cheeked and bright, daddy’s little angel and mommy’s little star.  
Even as a child actress she is well behaved - always on time, never missing any lines, ever the polite and dependable little prodigy.  
  
A mature teenager, too, despite the line of work her mother pushes her into. Drugs, booze, older men who calls her _sweetheart_ and promises her the world but Chloe never even makes it to third base until she’s seventeen and then it’s with the nicest boy in her class. The first time she's drunk she's nineteen.   
  
She’s a good wife to Dan, a good mother to Trixie, a pleasant neighbor, a good cop - hard-working and upstanding, she has a terrific solve-rate and a great reputation to boot, she does thorough research, keeps a cool head and knows all the rules.  
  
Lucifer points it out almost daily. Tells her to go home half an hour early, to buy that piece of cake she ogles, to have a drink, to sleep late, to say what she really thinks about someone or something even if it’s about him or _especially_ if it’s about him - he does love a good banter. Teases her to try new things - smelly cheese, seafood, duck, vegan sushi - because he thinks she would like it, because she’s _a grown woman not a child_. Encourages her to trust her instincts, to go with her first impression of something, to let loose. To dance at Lux in the middle of the workweek, smoke a joint and watch the sunset from his balcony instead of going to the gym.  
  
He works, quietly and diligently, at lowering the barriers she’s set between herself and all those things that simply are not good for her. _But admit_ _that they'd make you happy, detective?_  
  
The Vatican has ugly names for it.  
  
It hurts, reading the texts.  
  
It hurts even more, seeing the pictures.  
  
And _she_ hurts because her world has broken into a million pieces where terrifying things like God appear in the ruins and she doesn’t _believe_ in God but Lucifer is the _Devil_ and she’s been wrong about everything.  
  
“It is truly what is best for everyone,” Father Kinley says and Chloe nods.   
  
_So when you went to Europe to do something for yourself, it ended up being about the greater good for mankind?_ Lucifer’s voice in her head is warm and kind even when he’s teasing. _How very Detective Decker of you._ _  
  
_

* * *

  
  
  
  
  
  
Rome is awful. 

Trixie pretends to love the food and the buildings but really, there’s just old stone everywhere. And people speaking Italian with her, which makes her feel homesick and awkward for not even knowing how to say _sorry, wrong language_ . It has to be the hair, she concludes, since everyone speaks English with her mom. Trixie misses English. She misses her room and her friends, misses life the way it was before all this with Marcus and Charlotte.  
  
The other cities have been nice but this one really just is a whole lot of churches and mom cries every night at the hotel when she thinks Trixie can’t hear.  
  
They share a room, share a _bed_ most nights - mom insists, her arms almost suffocating as Trixie falls asleep to bedtime stories she’s much too old for but that mom keeps repeating this month, keeps talking about princesses and fairies and godmothers, falls asleep to _I’ll never let anything happen to you, monkey._ Trixie doesn’t want bedtime stories anymore. She wants to read her own books in her own bed but she humors mom because she seems so broken and scared.  
  
Before everything got weird Lucifer had given her the complete set of the Harry Potter books and they were the first thing Trixie even packed for this trip. When she got them mom had said she wasn’t old enough, that they might be scary but Lucifer had rolled his eyes, claimed Trixie is _far more intelligent than your average human spawn_ and it had bubbled wild and happy in Trixie’s belly and mom had felt bad about introducing Marcus in their lives so she hadn’t argued.  
  
So yeah, Rome is awful.  
  
But she has a lot of ice cream and reads those books and sends Lucifer messages when she finishes each one. Funny thing about him, Trixie thinks, is that he always seems so _busy_ and then she sends him a meme or a funny GIF with cats - he hates cats, she loves them and loves that he hates them; it’s complicated - and he responds like, within five minutes. No other grown-up does that.  
  
_OMG Snape kills Dumbledore!_ She adds a surprised owl that resembles Hedwig. She doesn’t know what time it is in LA or if he will even read this but she wants to tell him, it suddenly seems important. The way mom doesn’t talk about him, doesn’t talk about home at all - it leaves a little lump of fear in her and the idea of Lucifer helps.  
  
The response comes right away: _Didn’t see that one coming? I’m disappointed_ . A thumbs down followed by a snake emoji. For Slytherin, she assumes. He’s "naturally a Slytherin", according to himself. Trixie thinks he might just be a Gryffindor after having overheard enough of the “we’re not having a fight, monkey, we’re just discussing”-discussions between her parents to _not_ know that he often runs off to do dangerous things alone and unarmed. Like saving mom’s life. And probably other people's too.

Trixie grins. _Did too. SO obvi. Dumbledore was sneaky all book. Bet it’s a plan?_  
  
A thumbs up. _It is._ _Sherlock Espinoza. Well done indeed._  
  
_Hey! spoilers!_ She adds a cat meme, a knife, a smiley with its eyes crossed out. Mom wouldn’t like this at all but Trixie is pretty sure Lucifer doesn’t show her their chats.  
  
_Ancient books, keep up with the times!_  
  
She giggles out loud and mom sees that she’s using the phone. Which is when Rome turns even _more_ boring because suddenly mom’s face pales and she tells Trixie to stop. That she can’t use her phone any more when they’re in Rome unless they’re calling dad or grandma and there are costs and rules and even if they’re on holiday, they have to follow _rules_.  
  
“You okay, monkey?” Mom tugs at Trixie’s hair later, when they’re waiting for their dinner in a restaurant that apparently have fifty different kinds of pasta. It feels like they’ve already eaten all the different kinds of pasta that Italy can possibly have, but Trixie just nods into her Coke and looks at a dog by the entrance instead.  
  
“I’m fine,” Trixie mutters, leaning away from the touch.  
  
  
  
\---

Rome is awful and after Rome nothing is the same.  
  
Mom acts like it is. Dad acts like it isn’t. Both feels _wrong_.   
  
Trixie tries to talk to Lucifer but he’s not the same either and his smile is off when she meets him at the precinct and tells him she finished the Harry Potter series. He smiles, he makes some jokes about the characters and now that she gets the references she laughs, feels old and _important_. But his eyes, she notices the whole conversation, his eyes are so very sad.  
  
Everyone’s just _sad_.  
  
Especially dad who misses Charlotte and both mom and grandma have told Trixie that it’s not her fault if dad cries but he never does that. He just talks in a strange tone - tight, low, as if he’s trying to keep himself from screaming - and Trixie doesn’t like the way it makes him speak of Charlotte, or Lucifer or of anything, really. She hugs him hard, tries to bring him back to how he was before but even when he laughs and sings along to her favorite songs when they make dinner his eyes are different. Blank and hollow behind the laughter. They scare her.  
  
She can’t tell mom. She _could_ tell Lucifer but they don’t see him anymore and he doesn’t answer when she sends him messages, hasn’t even read the last ten she sent.  
  
Trixie re-reads the Harry Potter books; she writes in the margins, underscores, doodles, makes exclamation points and tells herself that one day maybe she’ll get to discuss them with Lucifer or make Maze read them loud to her.   
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
  
Dan knows he’s being pulled underwater.  
  
No longer treading it like he was back when Palmetto went down and he had been forced to lie to his co-workers, lie to his bosses, lie to Chloe though he could see, physically _watch_ , the torment it brought her. The taut lines of her shoulders, the way her chin jutted out, her tone stubborn and wounded. The way they all treated her. _Women, eh?_ He had stood up for her but that wasn’t enough, not when he simultaneously hid the truth; it had turned him into the bad guy in her eyes - in _his_ eyes - and that sort of label doesn’t come off, not without serious effort.  
  
No longer treading water but losing his bearings, he grapples for the surface and thinks of Charlotte, of roads taken and mistakes made and he sinks, sinks, sinks.  
  


\---  
  
  
“I’ve got a lot on my plate right now,” he tells Amenadiel who shows up with his tickets and his requests for company like Dan could just pop in and out of work like Amenadiel's brother, head out for a game or a couple of beers and talk about life and women and the daily grind.

Like Dan could just go back to the life he had _before_. 

\---  
  
  
“It’s about the journey not the destination,” Ella says brightly, giving him a case update and Dan snaps, first on the inside and then, when she goes on, on the outside because although she claims to have given up on the big guy, she still _means_ it.  
  
Dan wishes he did. Hell, he wishes he believed in god, too. And in guardian angels and unicorns and Santa. But in reality, people struggle and fail and die without greater purpose, without any kind of logic. And he cuts Ella off, lectures her about God and her faith and it aches in his conscience to see her expression, that slightly mystified look and the defiance in her eyes when she removes the necklace.  
  
Like he has any right to question her beliefs.  
  
Like he has any damn _right_. 

\---

  
“Hey, you know I’m here if you wanna talk.” Chloe, steadfast as always, glances sideways at him as they get out of her car. They’re without Lucifer, for once, finally and Dan can at least _breathe_ . Small mercies and all that crap.  
  
“Yeah, you know me, not a big talker.”  
  
Her half-grin tells him she vividly remember that part about him as a husband, at least.  
  
“Everyone can change,” she says, generously. “Anyway. I’m here for you.”  
  
He wishes he could say the same, he thinks and swallows bile. Wishes he could reciprocate without keeping secrets, without breaking the rules - laws - he knows she loves because she believes in them instead of God. Believes in following protocol because there has to be something separating good guys from bad and if everyone’s letting the ends justify the means, then what sort of world are they creating for their children? He hears all that in Chloe’s voice in his head and that voice is _disappointed_ .  
  
He wishes he could be better for her, for Trixie.  
  
He wishes the world could be as good as Chloe wants it to be, that the LAPD could be the champions she would fight anyone to make them.  
  
The car door leaves a dull, metallic sound as it closes. 

  
\---  
  
  
  
And then Maze stands there like a beacon of action and he follows her, breathless with anger and excitement and the thought that finally, _finally_ he gets to solve someone’s damn problems for a change.  
  
He didn’t become a cop to wait for judges to get off their fat asses long enough to approve warrants.   
  
The fight sings in his blood afterwards, a violent cry that seems to rise from some primeval force beyond his control, hold a deeper, darker purpose.  
  
It’s such a rush, this infuse of power in his veins. Like drugs, only better because this doesn’t dull his senses at all, it sharpens them, shapes them into blades as sharp as Maze’s badass ones. He’s high on adrenaline, on his own strength, on the thought that he had put his foot down in there, shown them that they can’t get away with their bullshit.   
  
“Oh! Old Dan is _back_ ,” she says and he could damn well kiss her right on the spot. 

  
  
\---

  
  
The fight lingers in his blood, on his _skin_ later in the shower where he stands so long that Trixie bangs on the door, telling him it’s time for her to brush her teeth and go to bed and he almost startles to hear her voice.  
  
_Trixie_.  
  
Who cuddles up to him in her bad when he turns off her night lamp and puts away the book they’re reading together - some YA science fiction story about a new planet; Dan’s mentally drifting off at the innocent pre-teen romance but Trixie loves it - to ask about his day.  
  
“Uh, it was a good day, munchkin.”  
  
Twenty people and Maze’s goddamn blades. Why’d they put on such a damn show? What the hell was he thinking? Twenty people with cellphones - if that fighting ends up online somewhere he’s done for. The LAPD has overlooked so much already, because he knows too much about some of them but surely they won’t let him get away with yet another mistake. _Shouldn’t_ .  
  
Dan clears his throat, presses his lips to Trixie’s head that smells of warm hair and the wildflower shampoo she uses now, since Europe.  
  
“Yeah?” She sounds so worried lately, that little hitch in her voice that makes him want to hold her like he did when she was a baby and he carried her in one of those multi-functional super expensive carriers that had made the guys at the precinct tease him for years afterwards. He could not have cared less.  
  
“Yours, too?” he asks.  
  
She nods against his chest and he doesn’t get up, doesn’t leave her bed until his back aches and Trixie is fast asleep. Then he stands there for a long time, watching his kid and everything that surrounds her. The plastic stars above her bed, the home-made planets she’d crafted over at Chloe’s at some point last year and insisted on hanging up in an “accurate arrangement” using wires. Her bookshelves full of brightly-colored adventures, most of them set on different planets than Earth. All these domestic touches of his life that _actually_ means something. They hit him, one by one, until he loses the fight entirely.  
  
He’s _drowning_.  


* * *

  
  
  
  
So Decker finds out what Linda has already known for ages and handles it _way_ worse. Maze always knew she would. She had not expected to feel quite this enraged about it, however.  
  
Granny Panties Decker is sweet, like _nauseatingly_ sweet and forgiving. Case in point: Pierce. Case in point: Lucifer. Case in point: Dan. Case in point: the entire damn LAPD. But she wants her life to make sense, she likes to prepare meals for tomorrow, buy Christmas gifts in September and go to the stores where you buy food in bulk because you never know when you come across this kind of deal next and she doesn’t want any surprises along the way because she needs a _plan_ .  
  
None of this crap makes any sense and it doesn’t give her the chance to plan.  
  
Maze gets that. (Or well, she gets that some humans _are_ like that, even if the thought makes her want to stab her own eyes out.)  
  
What Maze doesn’t get is going full deluded priest-paranoia on Lucifer’s ass. Now she’s seen Decker’s skittish movements ever since she got back from her travels, has spotted the vivid signs of fear in her face, that guarded expression she has when she thinks she’s being a good liar. It has been clear to everyone that whatever her claims, _nothing’s_ been fine with Decker since Cain got a one-way ticket to Hell. Maze knows a personal crisis when she sees one. Still, the magnitude of this one surprises her - she’s been away to catch a bounty and returns home to a level of misery that makes her grind her damn teeth.  
  
_Nobody plots against Lucifer but me, bitch._  
  
“What the _fuck_ did she _do_ ?” Maze half-shouts, storming into his penthouse. “What did the holier-than-thou, stupid-ass-”  
  
“Don’t speak of her _that way_ !” He growls threateningly but at least he’s standing up, leaving his man-cave area to tower over her. A welcome change by the look of his home. How does he even manage to make such a mess in just a few days? “It’s not her fault that I’m the bloody Devil, now is it?”  
  
_It’s not yours, either._ _  
_  
She throws her hands in the air, he backs off.  
  
“Fine.” The state of his home is pathetic, one look around is enough for her to want to bring out his cleaning equipment and that’s damn well saying something. “But I’m staying.”  
  
There’s a tortured groan emerging from him, an outstretched sound, like he’s in the throes of his own hell-loop. Oh and he _is_ , she realizes suddenly, with that violent pang of what Linda tells her is empathy but feels like _shit_. He rakes a hand through his hair that obviously hasn’t seen shampoo in a while and stands upright in thick black curls. Another pang in her chest. She always thought he looked _wildly_ attractive after a long party weekend or an extended orgy, all unkempt and free. He spends entirely too much time manscaping for her tastes.  
  
“I’m afraid I’m not very good company at the moment, Mazikeen.”  
  
“You mean you’re going to play the piano and cry and need me out of the way?” It’s only half a joke, but she can’t help but grin at it. He doesn’t.  
  
“I’m _hardly_ a schoolgirl.”  
  
_Jury’s still out on that one, my lord._  
  
“Yeah, whatever. I’ve seen you bawl before, Lucifer. You’re a big wuss who wants to be good. Cain nailed that bit about you, by the way, even if he was a stupid fucking-”  
  
“Will there be a _point_ to all this?” He cuts her off and reaches for an unopened bottle of hard liquor. O.P Anderson Aquavit. Hardcore Swedish booze. Maze knows he only goes for that if he’s in a particularly rough place. There’s a clatter of glass against glass. “Neat?”  
  
“What-” she keeps forgetting that making her drinks is something he does now. At least her lord of Hell or Lux or whatever it is he aims for these days can’t be said to have a bad memory for the important details. “Yeah, no ice, who do you take me for? And the point is that I can listen to you whine. Pretty used to it by now, actually.”  
  
“Right.”  
  
“So whine.” She slumps down in his sofa that he never fails to remind her is Italian leather as though that would mean something to her. Throws her feet on his glass table and ignores his irritated frown. “Then give me a bounty or assignment. Something I can work with. Someone I can beat up. A priest, someone Chloe likes - I’m open to suggestions.”  
  
“Maze-”  
  
“I’m _here_ , yeah? That’s the point. I’m your right-hand demon, Lucifer. I’ve got this. Nobody is going to drag you back to hell on my watch.” She downs her drink and slams it down on the table again. “We clear?”

Their eyes meet and she thinks she can see the faintest hint of a smile playing in the corner of his mouth.  
  
“Clear as hell, Mazikeen.”

* * *

  
  
  
  
  
There’s an increasingly common, if somewhat provocative, conception in her field of expertise that encourages transparent documentation. For self-discovery-purposes, for helping out with anxiety over empowerment and as a part of a strong, healthy doctor-patient relationship built on mutual trust. It is assumed that many patients may benefit from reading their own medical journals.  
  
Linda isn’t particularly sure that _Lucifer_ is one of those patients but the issue becomes moot when he, true to his nature, happens to stumble across his journal.  
  
Just stumbling. The way one does.  
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
**Assorted & unedited excerpts from Lucifer Morningstar’s journal**  
  
_Patient reports delusions, obsessions and compulsions, feelings of loss of control over life. Persists in maintaining “Devil-persona” which appears to be a strongly developed case of projection. High-functioning alcoholic - ~~??~~  
  
__-_ ** _Histrionic_** _? DSM-5 does_ ** _not_** _support diagnosis. Patient is not suggestible nor emotional enough._ _  
__-_ ** _DID_** _? Unlikely, patient describes no transition + entirely self-aware._ _  
__-_ ** _Lucifer Effect_** _? Patient admits to no criminal record. Likely to exaggerate own “sins”._ _  
__  
_ ((Narcissistic tendencies rooted in a complex paternal relationship and a disrupted adolescence v. likely.)) _  
__  
__History of abuse possible - has displayed violent behavior._ ((Punched hole in my wall. HOW? Steroids? Appearance not typical of steroid user.)) _Reported feelings of excessive guilt and lack of self-care._ _Strong_ _tendency to self-sabotage interpersonal relationship. Patient is high-functioning but disassociates._ _  
__  
__-_ ** _BPD_** _? Possible, esp. given the likely history of abuse/child abuse._ _  
_  
_Patient admits homicidal ideation, excessively violent behavior and inappropriate as well as illegal activity. Patient denies suicidal ideation, though several actions contradict this statement._ _  
__  
_ ((HE’S. THE. **LITERAL**. DEVIL.))  
  
((All prev. notes will be revised.))  
  
((On second thought - he’s still my patient. Who is still exhibiting all of the previously mentioned symptoms.)) _  
_  
_Patient shows_ _severe_ _effects of long-term familial rejection which include but are not limited to: trauma, pain response, depression. Patient reports increased activity, agitation, risk taking behavior and excessive fears._ **Abandonment? Abuse? Child neglect v. likely. RAD?** ((Not sure deities can give angels attachment disorders. Can deities be neglectful parents? How ARE angels brought up? ))  
  
_Halted progress. Patient reports feelings of loss of control over life again as well as fear of being manipulated. Reports severe self-mutilation as well as various self-destructive behaviors, substance abuse and identity issues._ ((Wings. He’s cutting off his damn wings. Repeatedly. How do I make him stop?)) _  
__  
__Progress re: tendency to self-sabotage interpersonal relationships. Patient shows clear signs of progress in understanding own emotions and their value but limited willingness to express said emotions. Patient is still projecting. Patient displays ~~little to~~ __no_ _self-compassion and has a strong tendency towards splitting. Patient alternates between emotional detachment and intense fear of rejection._ _  
__  
__Patient in crisis. Self-medicates (substance abuse) and dissociates. Trauma coincided with exposure of great personal vulnerability._ ((devil face - returned! Refuses to talk about this at all. I’m afraid he’ll start self-mutilating again, is it possible to cut off a devil face?)) _Patient reports severe anxiety and fear of abandonment. Severe splitting, unwillingness to analyze the situation._ ((For anyone else, I’d suggest inpatient care.))  
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
“ _Fascinating_. Doctor, when you put it like this it really does seem like I’m fit for the loony bin, doesn’t it?” Lucifer sits in the middle of her couch, as usual, handing back her tablet across the table.  
  
“Yes, _well_.” Linda places her hands on her knees, leans back in her seat. “Would you like to talk about that?”  
  
“No, why?” He downs a glass of water and smiles briefly at her.  
  
All these sessions, she thinks during days like today, all these sessions that bear so many similarities to those with actual humans and yet they are so, _so_ far away.  
  
“Because you clearly aren’t doing very well at the moment.”  
  
He arches an eyebrow, his gaze dark and intense. “That’s because the detective tried to perform bloody exorcism on me, not because I’m mentally ill!”  
  
“No,” Linda agrees. “You’re not. You’re the devil. But you’re also a man in a lot of pain.”  
  
He scoffs, brushes a hand over his forehead where his hair is falling into his eyes. She’s only ever seen him disheveled after - well, after fucking him in so many different ways that her mind is still reeling from it years later but that’s beside the point. Or _on_ point. The devil is a vain creature, he keeps himself tidy.   
  
Linda tries not to judge people. Or well, she _does_ judge people but she tries not to _tell_ anyone about it. It’s a compromise, of sorts. She understands that a self-proclaimed atheist - Chloe had declared God _a stupid hurtful lie_ during the very drunk and _very_ emotionally repressed birthday party they threw at Lucifer’s penthouse - would freak out. Linda had done the same. At least for a day or two.  
  
It does seem a little excessive to join a fringe group of fanatics, even Doctor Linda Martin would admit to that if asked. But she isn’t _judging_. Chloe is her friend.   
  
“Since the ritual was averted, I can assure you the pain was kept to a minimum.” Lucifer pours another glass of water, leans back, meets her gaze. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a long time, far longer than he can go without rest, at any rate.  
  
She smiles, softly and exasperatedly, all the frustration and tenderness she feels for this man summed up in one gesture.   
  
“Was it, though, Lucifer? Was it _really_?

* * *

  
  
  
  
The humans have _hurt_ him and Azrael seethes from her shadows.  
  
She likes humanity but it’s a cruel race, fully on par with the angels above.   
  
Every time she visits they appear to have invented new ways, longer-lasting weapons and torments with greater scope, farther reach. Their creativity when it comes to inflicting pain is massive but this method is as old as time. Betrayal, she thinks. Betrayal leaves a dark scent.  
  
She hasn’t been here to witness the hurt but she’s picked up traces of unrest across the city, people dying for the wrong reasons. That sort of death always leave a little pinprick in her mind that she mostly cannot do anything with but this time the track leads back to her brother.  
  
_Oh, Lu._  
  
His home is sparsely lit apart from the tiny brilliant lights above his piano, those that resemble the night sky as seen from Heaven; she is reminded again of the many little ways in which he has built himself a replica of the place he was banished from. It’s sentimental, but so is Lu, the vocation for humanity a part of his design. She wonders if he even realizes.  
  
He looks the same as last time she visited, perhaps a little more worn, a little less angelic. She wonders if Earth washes it away, that divine shroud they are born with. Remiel would say that Earth taints it; Azrael thinks it might be the other way around, that the angels that walk the Earth leave tiny particles of divinity in their wake.  
  
_Play my favorite song, brother. I haven’t heard it since your exile._  
  
His hands fly over the keys, his eyes are closed and she notices the wasteland of empty bottles and fast food boxes on the floor, notices the way his hands shake a little when she comes nearer. But at least he’s playing. He had not played a single chord for days after Uriel. Now the divine notes are there, they’re flying through the room, entangled with the human music her brother is so fond of. The effect is heartbreaking.   
  
Azrael sneaks closer, cloaked in her shadows but slipping as the music increases and she thinks Lu looks over his shoulder but she isn’t certain.  
  
When she lets her right hand rest at the back of his head, however, she knows he can sense her because he tenses, pauses the music for a brief moment. Then he picks it up again, a different expression on his face, a few of those taut lines smoothed out. He’s warm and solid, nothing like the shadows she resides in all day, nothing like the departed souls she holds in her arms and she’s always missing _touch_ .  
  
They were always a bit off in their design, Lu and her. Yearning for things never meant for them.  
  
Or perhaps they’re just right, she thinks. Perhaps they are simply not _done_ .  
  
_I won’t let anyone banish you from anywhere ever again, Lu._

Lucifer leans back into her hand, stretches out his back and rubs his hair against her palm. She smiles. He knows.  
  
She remains standing there with him for as long as she can, letting him play uninterrupted and he _does_ , oh he does play all the music she remembers from Heaven; all the sounds that were replaced with nothing but silence he fills again now, for her, for them. If she closes her eyes she is certain she could see the stars breathe and dance but she doesn’t want to miss anything in this room, in this strange human city.  
  
Just as she is called to leave and removes her hand from his neck, he turns around and looks at her, straight into her eyes.  
  
And then he plays her song.


	3. The major lift

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He is the Devil and she _loves_ him.

**IV - The major lift**  
  


_Be strong, to look on my heart_

_As others look on my face._

_Love me,—I tell you that it is a ravaged_

_Terrible place._

**Song - Louise Bogan**

* * *

  
  


Things gather around them this fall, ache and twist, break apart.  
  
And then, out of nowhere, Chloe stands outside Ella’s door.  
  
It’s a first. Which seems like a bad omen, almost as wrenching as a call in the middle of the night. It’s definitely uncommon enough that she almost hesitates to open thinking _oh no it's bad news, what did my brothers do this time which one is dead._

“I thought, you know, I could meet this Margaret.” Chloe looks tiny on the other side of the door, all scruffy and red-eyed. "I brought beer. Well, not for the chicken. You know?"

She holds up a six pack of _Heisler_. Ella relaxes into a grin. Nobody’s _dead_. But Chloe’s a mess.  
  
“Oh. yeah. Totally,” she says, trying to conjure up a little more enthusiasm than she feels. She thinks about the popcorn and binge-watching she had planned. She thinks about the mess she left in the kitchen the other day, wonders how quickly she can clean it up. Chloe’s place is usually spotless even with Maze living there so Ella figures that tidiness is something she values in people, but decides to let it go. Worry less, drink more. “ _Totally_ .”  
  
It’s a strange night in many ways. Possibly in all of them.

They greet Margaret who doesn’t deign to give them as much as a glance, move to the living room area of Ella’s studio apartment and sit down, awkwardly, to drink the first beer. Chloe fidgets with Ella's Storm-trooper pillow, leans back, leans forward again, takes another mouthful of beer.  
  
“I know you’re on a… break with God but - do you think you can be forgiven for anything?” she asks then, hurriedly, words falling out like a game of Mikado.

 _Whoa_.  
  
Ella blinks. A bit too early and with too little beer in the system to throw out that kind of question, if you ask her. Which, admittedly, Chloe doesn't. She just... jumps straight to the existential angst.  
  
“Is this about Lucifer? Did he do something?”  
  
All the inconsistencies that surround him, Ella thinks. All the things she shuffles back into the darkness of her mind where she keeps her madness. Holds it, seals it, _hides_ it. She’s almost afraid to talk about him at this point because it might mean peeking into that and she’s not _ready_. Not for Gods and not for Devils.  
  
Chloe makes a strange noise into her bottle.  
  
“No,” Chloe shakes her head. “No. _He_ didn’t.”  
  
_Oh_.  
  
They’re quiet for a while, drinking and listening to the music Ella’s dragged out from one of her less gloomy playlists. She wonders if Lucifer is okay but is afraid to ask since Chloe always shuts down when things get too rough to talk about and there’s been this sense of _gloom_ lately over her but they’ve also been in a place where neither ask the other one too much about, well, anything. After Pierce they have sort of faded out, the bright and easy spots between them. And Lucifer’s been looking awful ever since. Ella, nursing her wrath against God like a permanent hangover, has sent him messages and spoken to him as often as she’s had the opportunity, but the threads aren’t there and it’s hard to pull someone in without them.  
  
“Back when I believed in it, I used to think that yeah, God would forgive anything,” she says, eventually, picking up the question Chloe left. “But humans, though. We don’t _have_ to forgive. We forgive what we can and leave the rest to God.”  
  
“So you have to earn it? The forgiveness?”  
  
“You sound like Lucifer. No, what I mean is that I think - well, _thought_ \- it’s something you’re given. You can ask for it but you can’t _demand_ it. Like - _love_.”  
  
Chloe doesn't appear consoled by that; Ella glances at her, as if she'd be able to tell from her face what it is that she's really asking tonight. 

Glances at the floor when the weight of the topic hits her, over and over again. She’d been such a wreck back when she tried removing herself from a criminal path, such a _mess_ and He had been there. He had. There’s no other way she can explain what happened, how she felt and how it developed. _When nobody else will stand by you, God will. God can bear it._

She feels tears sting in her eyes at the thought, the physical memory of God’s grace. How can it be a _lie_? 

“Do you want to talk about it?” Chloe asks suddenly. All in on the blurting-out-heavy-questions-train tonight, apparently. “That you... skip church?”  
  
“Oh.” Ella swallows, shakes her head. “No, I don’t actually. But… thanks for asking.”

They’re quiet again, long pauses between everything and Chloe starts her third beer before she looks at Ella again, tugging at her lower lip.   
  
“You never get mad at him. Just… everything he does and you’re cool with it. How do you _do_ it?” she asks; her tone is soft and tired, weary like the ground beneath their feet.  
  
“At Lucifer?” Ella shrugs, grateful to change the topic somewhat. “Dude, I don’t know, I mean he has his reasons i guess. We all do. I’ve looked out for my family my whole life. Most of the time they don’t even care. They ghost me for ages and think I should mind my own business. I mean, I know that deep down they’re good people. But I don’t have it in me to care as much as I used to, you know? But with Lucifer -” she smiles a little, thinking about the opera, about the helicopter ride, about the dress he had bought for abuelita, too, when she told him she’d be taking her. _I promised the full experience, Miss Lopez, certainly you must understand that goes for your grandmother as well, can’t have you arrive there on unequal terms_ . “He gives what he gets. Usually more. And he-”  
  
_He is the only one who wouldn’t judge me if I told him everything about myself._

“He’s like a brother.”  
  
“Good.” Chloe nods, looking like she’s considering something very intently. There’s a heavy streak of sadness - maybe guilt - in her face but Ella can’t bring herself to ask. It’s not a night for it. “Good. I’m… happy he got you.”  
  
“I thought he’s… got you, as well?”  
  
A soft sigh followed by the thud when Chloe’s bottle hits the table. “Yeah.”  


* * *

  
  
Slowly, things return to almost-normal.  
  
Trixie finds Maze again, a little bit. They’re supervised now, no horror movie or babysitting because something is different to the way they’re doing stuff, like her parents have erased the shell of one of Trixie’s model planes all and re-built and it isn’t even the same.  
  
They practice fighting but without knives, play video games that dad says are okay, laugh at stupid jokes and eat cookie dough while mom cleans really loudly. It’s great, it really is, but there’s something angry in the way Maze acts around them now, something that has changed. At first Trixie can’t tell _what_ it is, then she recognizes the look on Maze’s face, the glint in her eyes. It’s the look Alexis had when Olivia told her she could _totally_ come to her sleepover party even though Alexis is bullied and everyone knows it but then when she _did_ go, the girls took terrible pictures of her and posted to Snapchat. Trixie had been sitting beside her outside school when she got the invitation and said _hey, we could do something else, like cinema? I’ll ask mom_ but Alexis had really wanted to go. Even if her eyes had been so suspicious and sort of hurt already. Because she had known. Everyone always _knows_.  
  
And now Trixie knows, too, and it stings on the inside.  
  
Maze doesn’t _trust_ mom.  
  
“Did you do something bad?” she asks later when they’re alone and mom is making tea, though Trixie can’t remember the last time her mom had tea, didn’t even know she likes tea. Sometimes her parents try to be different people, though - _make some changes for the better_ \- so she figures this is one of those times.  
  
“Umm…” comes the reply, then mom pops her head out from behind the cupboard door. “What do you mean?”  
  
Trixie stares down at her half-finished homework, her hands on table. “With Maze and… _Lucifer_. Are they angry with you? Because of something you did?”  
  
“Oh.” Mom’s face falls apart at the seams; it leaves a lurching kind of distress deep in Trixie’s belly. “Well. yeah. I did. I did something very stupid. And very… hurtful.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“Well.” She looks thoughtful for a while, twisting her fingers through her ponytail and frowning. That’s how Trixie knows she’s doing her serious thinking that she calls considering _\- I’m still considering what you said, monkey_ \- and doesn’t want to give an answer just like that. “You know how sometimes we say bad things when we’re afraid or sad?”  
  
Trixie nods.  
  
“It’s kinda like that. I was very scared, and um, well, very sad.”  
  
“Because of Marcus?”  
  
That name is still weird to say, she notices, it makes mom’s face close like a door. But she nods.  
  
“Yeah, a little bit was about Marcus. And a lot of it… weren’t. But I was not feeling good at all. And I didn’t think about how other people would feel about what I did, either. I just… I have been a _very_ bad friend to Lucifer.”   
  
“Don’t worry, Lucifer will forgive you, right? You should go to his house and say you’re sorry. Right?”  
  
Dad had made her do this once, she still remembers. But it’s always different for grown-ups, they never have to do the worst bits. Like saying sorry in front of a whole room of people that stare at you.  
  
“You know what, monkey,” mom says. “I think right now what Lucifer needs is to have a little time to be… he needs a little time to himself.”  
  
It doesn’t sound _right_ , but then again, Trixie knows this is one of those occasions when it doesn’t matter what _she_ says.  


* * *

  
  
  
There’s something in the way Eve looks at him that makes Chloe’s stomach turn into hot lava and _pain_ , a heavy, throbbing pain that she isn’t used to, hasn’t been used to since her dad died. It’s an irrevocable kind of ache, outlined by regret and missed opportunity. Of _nevers_ and _might-have-beens_.

Eve looks at him like he is the lightbringer, the angel who pulled light from the sky and painted the constellations with it. She knows his true form, his true heart, and she _worships_.  
  
Chloe, on the other hand, has betrayed him to Father Kinley.  
  
She has stood in front of him and thought _this is for_ _the best, forgive me but this is for the best_ while he was planning dates and mishandling casework. Has been angry with him for the weakness she feels, the softness he brings out of her. How dare he destroy the resolve she had built up, she had asked herself, ashamed even in front of the mirror. That vial, the stupid damned vial, has been in her purse for over a month and even if she knew she wouldn’t be able to poison him she hadn’t taken it out. Why hadn’t she taken it out? 

Lucifer's face when she had told him, _no_ that's not even the worst part because the worst came later when he asked, wide-open and _terrified_ to hear her answer, if she could accept him.  
  
And she had not said yes, had not wanted any more lies between them, had forced the truth even though it would crush them both. 

For the rest of her life she will wonder if that was what he looked like then, at the beginning of time, when he was banished from Heaven. 

Chloe organizes her computer at work, she cleans her desk, rearranges the case files that Lucifer somehow always ends up scattering like a pile of leaves whenever he spends more then ten minutes around her; she calls her mother, she picks up Trixie and she refuses to let herself think about the way Eve’s eyes are tender and so _full_ , bursting with love.  
  
Even when Chloe, all raw emotion and instinct, throws herself on top of Lucifer to shield him from the bomb that doesn’t go off and all her doubts are smashed to dust, even then she can’t unsee that glance, those heavily-lidded eyes that never lets him out of sight.  
  
She forces back the tears of relief, of bittersweet happiness when she sees him sitting there, almost entirely recovered once she got out of his way; she swallows the selfishness, the _want._

“No wonder your father is proud of you,” Amenadiel - bless him, oh, _bless_ him - tells her the following night and Chloe finally allows herself to cry.  
  
It doesn’t help.  


* * *

  
  
  
  
“Our brothers are out of control, sister.”  
  
Azrael is nearly blinded by the bright light of Remiel’s arrival in the Silver City. She has always flown like she’s being chased by Leviatan himself and with a dramatic flair that not even Lu is capable of outdoing.  
  
“All of them?”  
  
“Very funny.”  
  
“No, I’m genuinely wondering.” Azrael shakes her wings and brushes travel dust off her clothes before she leans against the walls of the largest temple in the whole city. The temple of learning back when they still were training. “I never see Michael, for example, what _is_ he up to these days?”  
  
Remiel isn’t open to idle conversation about unreliable family members, though, her face is nothing but a displeased expression of focus.  
  
“There’s a new celestial approaching. How could you allow your precious Lucifer to be so irresponsible?”  
  
Azrael nearly bursts out laughing. “What? _Allow_? Me?”  
  
“You are your brother’s keeper, Azrael. And you are down on Earth _all_ the time.”  
  
“Woah, let me tell you one thing, Remy, I do not participate in my brother’s private… shenanigans. I have a job to do.”  
  
“He shouldn’t even _have_ shenanigans.” Remiel’s face is hard in the light from the endless sun above. _Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind._ That was the title of a movie Ella had loved, she remembers it well. Azrael had kept the phrase in her heart, thought it reminded her of Heaven. Clean, fresh, maybe a little bit boring if you squint.  
  
"Keeping him from it would be like keeping Father from being cryptic, Remi, you know this.”  
  
Her sister huffs dramatically. "I also sense unrest among the religious ones."

Azrael raises an eyebrow and reaches for her left.wing that needs to be cleaned after her journey here. "Again I ask which _ones_."

"Does it matter?"

"Usually."

It is funny to her that her siblings - well, two of them excluded these days - are so blessed with powers but cannot fathom the simple life-form that rule the Earth. Their little societies and orders, their laws and morals. Azrael only ever comes for the dead ones and yet _she_ grasps the fundamental hierarchies, the myriad of ways they have for living. 

“Be vigilant,” Remy adds. She’s spreading her wings and Azrael follows, annoyed that she’ll never be as fast or lithe as the huntress of Heaven. All the memories of _before_ surfacing when they move like this - Remiel or Gabriel or Michael hurrying forward, Azrael in tow, falling behind. And then Lu, cheating although the only one who could compete with him was Michael on a good day - and Amenadiel if he had participated.  
  
“You haven’t answered my question about -" Azrael pants. "- _Michael_ .”  
  
But her sister is already gone as the name scatter into the Silver City.  


* * *

  
  
  
For a very long time humans have spent a worrying amount of their lifespans completely preoccupied with the Devil, especially the ones who proclaim to be men and women of faith.  
  
He wonders if it truly had been the intention of the Creation, distracting them to such an extent from the path they ought to be taking, the deity they _should_ seek. But he supposes that one cannot exist without the other in Father’s perfect dichotomy so he bows his head and accepts this, too.  
  
When the humans build cities and nations, when they begin to gather in larger crowds than before, they build themselves a Devil to go with the cathedrals. Lucifer moans about the depictions though he cannot refrain from pointing out that Amenadiel has none.  
  
He is not the angel meant to be known to humankind.  
  
He is the angel meant to be the Devil’s guardian.  
  
It’s not a simple task.   
  
Certain centuries of human history are more enamored with the idea of the Devil than others. There are art, literature, poetry, sculptures and entire sections of the church devoted to him. Great minds bend and tweak the books and scriptures they believe are written by Father, theorize and reconsider. At the outskirts of each grand work of art depicting Hell, there’s that dark lure, the attraction waiting to ensnare those of little faith.  
  
Certain centuries of human history, the only thing the Devil breeds is terror.  
  
Amenadiel cannot help but think that his brother is the determining factor.  
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
In Prague, during the 14th century, there’s a secret order of monks dedicated to revealing the Satan that prowls the streets, looking for someone to devour.  
  
“Preposterous, brother,” Lucifer drawls, leaning against a tree near the House of the Stone Bell. “They stink of sweat and _worship_ , the lot of them. I would rather devour a pig.”  
  
“We should leave immediately, regardless.”  
  
“But I’m not even _drunk_ yet.” His brother nods towards the tavern that lies further ahead, a brightly shining beacon to the lord of Hell, he assumes. To Amenadiel it is a threat, an immediate danger to the separation of holy and profane. Lucifer, of course, embodies that danger entirely.  
  
These monks, he fears, have spotted it, too, the Devil in human form. Their coat of arms cry _The Lord is our Relief_ and it seems almost like an invitation.  
  
They are devoted, Amenadiel has to give them that. Night and day they patrol, pray, chant, kneeling in prayer before their altars and cries to Father. It hurts to see their misguided faith, he thinks. To see it wasted, deformed.  
  
“And I do want to see them try, brother.” The glint in Lucifer’s eyes is grim, hard. “They have set out to reveal me, after all. What _are_ they intending next I wonder? A public orgy? A chant? To bathe me in holy water?”  
  
“Just come with me, Luci. I swear I shall send Father next time you behave in this obstinate-”  
  
Lucifer interrupts him with a growl, but at least he leaves the city to its own fate. 

\---  
  
  
  
In the 18th century there’s a vicar in a small parish in Cornwall who thinks he has found a way of chaining the King of Hell to his burning kingdom below, preventing him from ever again walk the Earth.  
  
“What a _dreadful_ thought,” Lucifer mutters through gritted teeth as they walk out of the local pub.  
  
“Then why are you _here_ ?”  
  
“Oh, I don’t know. Beer? All the men and women of easy virtue?”  
  
He should know better than to ask; he should know by now that his brother rarely requires a reason. For anything, _truly_ , but least of all his visits. Even so, there’s a dark streak in his thoughts surrounding this matter, a premonition of something lurking just outside Amenadiel’s understanding.  
  
Aeons in Hell have twisted his sense of purpose, he thinks now, in an attempt to unfold the layers. All this time without God has darkened his being, made him lose sight of the reasons for his creation, his soul’s higher mission. This, perhaps, is Amenadiel’s true task - to remind his brother of Father’s love and dedication. Yes, he decides; it feels right and _just_.   
  
He doesn’t even have time to finish his explanation to Lucifer before the hellfire blazes furiously, setting fire to a nearby tree.   
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
In the 20th century they stand outside a nightclub in New York, surrounded by neon lights that are atrociously cruel to Amenadiel’s senses - sharp and hard and _wrong_ . Nobody else seems to care, certainly not his brother. There is a feast of sorts in the city. Pride, the humans call it though he does not know - nor does he particularly care - what they are proud of today. Besides him, Lucifer smokes while carrying a half-empty bottle of vodka in his other hand. He doubts his brother knows the occasion either, but he catches on, adapts to anything, it seems. His human clothes are slightly creased, the top buttons are undone and he has what looks like glitter scattered in his curls.  
  
A picture of contemporary depravity.  
  
Humans are so modern now, so _refined_ and yet they believe in satanic rituals, in being led astray by the Devil. They pray to Satan or blame him for their misdeeds. Blame themselves through him for diseases, for catastrophes, for wars and destruction.  
  
“Perhaps you ought to leave Earth be.” Amenadiel suggests. “Let the humans redefine the divine without interference.”  
  
Lucifer scoffs. “Where’s the fun in that?”  
  
Always the same, he thinks. Every time, this massive closed gate of _defiance_. He takes a deep breath, watches his brother finish smoking his cigarette and stub it out on the street.  
  
“It’s not about _fun_ , Lucifer. You have a mission, a task assigned to you-”  
  
“A punishment, I do believe you mean.”  
  
“Call it what you will.” Amenadiel has to almost jump not to walk right into a man moving in a way that suggests he believes himself to be the king of the city. “Your task remains the same. This is indulgence on your part, brother. Unnecessary matters that only increase the risk for human-divine interference. You have already done your part in their history.”  
  
“My part? My _part_?”  
  
“Luci-”  
  
It’s dangerous ground, he should have minded his words more carefully.  
  
“Oh, you _do_ think it’s my _fault_ , don’t you, brother?” For all eternity and no matter where things are headed, Amenadiel thinks, he will never fully endure the hurt in his brother’s face. It had been there as he fell, it’s there now and it is a weapon of considerable power to those who still care about the lightbringer. A spear, a broken sword with jagged edges that cut deep. “You think I brought sin upon the world and should go back to my adamantine chains and penal fires.”  
  
“I do not.”

Doesn't he? Doesn't he just a _little_? No, he corrects himself. Father has a plan and they are both part of it.  
  
Lucifer rubs the bridge of his nose, shaking his head as though he is suddenly exhausted.  
  
“Oh but you do,” he says, voice low and angry. “You do believe that.”  
  
“No. And it does not matter what I think, Luci-”  
  
“Doesn’t it?” His eyes are fire, his gaze fixed on Amenadiel. “Then what matters? My _deeds_? Fair enough. I have never once done what the humans say I have. _Never_ ! I haven’t made any of them do anything. Why would I buy their souls? I don’t _want_ their bloody souls! I don’t want anyone to enter Hell ever again for as long as I exist. I want the place closed, gone. Now that, dear brother, would be what I truly desire.”  
  
“Lucifer-”  
  
“Come then,” Lucifer cuts him off, downs the remains of the vodka and glares at Amenadiel. “Let’s go back to my home, burning home. I’m certain there are some matters of utmost importance that I must see to right away, lest the world as we know it will fall to ruin.”  
  
His brother actually do stay away from Earth for several decades; Amenadiel has almost begun to think he has finally made his peace with Hell as its rightful ruler when they once more stand among the humans and Lucifer triumphantly declares that the City of Angels will be his home now.  
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
Holy men are trying to send his brother back to Hell again. To bind him there, he must presume.  
  
Amenadiel learns this from Mazikeen on his way to a Starbucks, which gives the message a supremely anachronistic touch. But he supposes that certain things remain, though centuries come and go and though the concepts of both Satan and sin evolve and morph they stay the same. An external force, a scapegoat. Someone to guide their hands.  
  
_I’ll be on the lookout for men of the cloth_ , he writes to Lucifer.  
  
The reply comes swiftly:  
  
**To help them or to help me?** **  
**  
_You. Of course._  
  
Lucifer returns his usual string of nonsensical fruits and signs and Amenadiel shakes his head.  
  
Holy men are trying to send his brother back to Hell.  
  
As though he has _ever_ left.  


* * *

  
  
  
For the rest of that year, the weeks and months that are drizzling down like a summer rain, they _talk_.  
  
Where there once were luxuries: easy friendship, ridiculous banter, a plethora of daily treats like lemon bars and various gifts that had slipped into her life so discreetly that she never even considered them until they vanished; in all those bright spots of light where they once were flirtatious partners there are now _absences_ and they fill them with words.  
  
Chloe misses him, _mourns_ him at times. He’s still in her life but there’s a breach, a wide gap that he left when she pushed him away and whatever they rebuild it can’t fill it because it’s endless. But they have work, they have hours of each other’s company and she will have to settle for it, it will _have_ to do.   
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
“I’m sorry about the mess,” she tells him the day after the intermezzo that nearly kills him and erases his nightclub. It’s still rubble and it’s still standing, and it’s even open - _a_ _night of ruin at Lux_ , _free drinks for all_ \- a paradox in the city, as always.  
  
“Oh, don’t worry, Detective.” Lucifer looks up from behind the intact bar disk, holding up two bottles. Intact ones unlike the shattered ones all over the floor. “ _Lux_ will be restored in no time. I have the best people in LA working on it.”  
  
She takes a few steps and her soles get stuck in the half-dried liquid puddles. Last night when she thought she would lose him - first because of closure, then because of death - she had kept thinking of how many time she’s been here, how many times they have laughed here, argued here, _danced_ here. Even now the imagined loss makes her throat constrict and she has to look away, firmly rubbing the bridge of her nose and feigning a cough.   
  
When she looks up, Lucifer observes her.   
  
“It’s only money,” he says, voice firm and gentle, the way she remembers it from before everything broke between them.  
  
She wants to say something more, something else; she moves out of the worst mess on the floor and spots Eve descending from the upper floor, all smiles and flowing hair and it’s not fair to think about her with that sense of dread. It’s not _fair_.  
  
Chloe clears her throat. “If I can do anything to help-”  
  
“It’s all going to be perfectly fine, Detective,” Lucifer says and smiles. “I will see you tomorrow at the precinct, you get to tell me all the boring details of our next case then.”  
  
It’s almost like before.   
  
It’s almost like she can believe them.  
  
  
  
\---

  
The times when they are most themselves are during stakeouts.  
  
Stolen time, she thinks. Had begun to think of it as such already back when he was caught up in his schemes with Charlotte Richards - or, her mind almost refuses the scope of what Linda had filled her in on, _Goddess of all Creation_ \- and Chloe barely saw him for days on end. She’d leap at the chance for a stakeout then, constantly missing his strange company.  
  
“You know, I meant to ask you something about Pierce,” she tells him, half-breathless and already regretting it, into a mug of stale takeaway coffee as they sit in her car in a parking lot, waiting for a potential suspect to possibly arrive. It’s not looking good. “Why did he - why was he… _after_ me?”  
  
Lucifer looks at her and there’s something opening up in his gaze, something deep and dark and so familiar that she wants to reach out and touch him. She _doesn’t_ ; they haven’t touched since she jumped on his gun wound, it’s a language they no longer speak.  
  
“He wanted to become mortal so he could die.”  
  
“Right. Because - _God-_ ” she still doesn’t really know how to use the word, how to pronounce it, how to _understand_ it. Lucifer’s face is calm and unreadable, his gaze composed again. She takes a deep breath. “Because God what, made him walk the Earth for an eternity? Because he didn’t regret killing his brother?”  
  
He nods. There’s a remark in there somewhere - _someone’s been reading up on the fanfiction about my dad_ \- but it remains in the air between them, lingering and useless.  
  
“He knew that you make me vulnerable. And because-” He looks at something on his side of the car; the lines of his profile against the window hits her, buries themselves inside her. Like splinters stuck just under the skin. She has always found him handsome but there are moments like these when he lets his guard down that _destroy_ her. “Well, Pierce thought you make me vulnerable because you-”  
  
“Because I love you?” Her voice is just a breath, a ghost. 

She wishes it was this simple, _wills_ it to be but the external forces are too strong by now, the odds no longer in their favor, if they ever were. If they are to do it, develop the relationship she craves, it will have to be when the time's right. She can't afford another failure.  
  
A shadow of something crosses Lucifer's face, it’s gone in an instance. “His theory was wrong. It had nothing to do with your feelings at all. The punishment ended when he did a selfless deed. The first, I suspect, in his immortal life.”  
  
_What a damn catch._ Chloe can’t hold back the grimace that surfaces whenever she thinks about it. About him. How stupid she had been, unprofessional and careless, while the rest of the world watched. But there's also a thread of leftover anger in there caused by Lucifer withholding information, keeping _secrets_ , he who does not lie. 

"I imagine this isn't as comforting to you as one would imagine, now is it?" Lucifer’s tone is soft and it makes everything more difficult so she turns it around, steers it in a different direction. 

"What, that the world's first murderer fell in love with me while using me for his schemes?” She raises an eyebrow, glancing sideways at him while keeping her eyes on the parking lot. Still nothing. “Not really no."

"Maybe you should start a collection of Biblical beaus." He catches on to her deflective humor like she knew he would and it's comfortable between them again. "I mean, there's always Eve. Come to think of it, Detective, there's _definitely_ some hidden potential- _ouch-_ _ow_."

He falls silent when Chloe slaps him gently on his arm, then grins at her until she has to laugh. 

Distractions, _diversions_. Oh they are as good at them as ever.   
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
Other times - rare, _precious_ times - she visits _Lux_ .  
  
Has drinks and his company, such as it is these days.  
  
There is something inconsolable in him - always has been, only then she never knew why - that spreads like a disease now whenever he isn't hiding in his orgy host persona. He had several different masks before, she thinks, plenty of layers to add to the inconsistent mystery of his true self. Fewer of them now, but they do seem more persistent, his composure resembling a stone wall most days. 

But tonight, both of them balancing on the edge after an upsetting investigation and - in his case- a lack of rest since he involved the world's first party girl in his life. Tonight they talk about Eden, about the fall of mankind and Chloe barely dares to draw breath out of fear of disrupting the conversation, the brittle honesty between them.

"I led a war against my Father" he says and pours them both drinks.

"Why?"

Lucifer is silent for a while. "Because I thought I stood a chance."

 _The lightbringer, in his pride_ , Father Kinley says in the darkest corner of her memory. _Sought to defy God himself, he could not bear the thought of his powers being second to anyone’s._

It lands heavily in her, rough edges and dark outlines and she wants something more. Or something _else_ . A cause, a purpose, something that reminds her of the man she has found in the idiot from _Lux_ , the reckless man that refused to learn when to quit.

"That can't be all there was to it. I know you, Lucifer-" she cuts herself off, the uncertainty makes the words thick and unutterable in her mouth. I know you she thinks again, ever stubborn, but the look in his eyes when he catches her gaze again brings doubt. "I mean, I don't know who you were _then_ but-"

Help me out here, she thinks. Give me _something_.

When she looks at him next she can spot pity in the weary expression on his face and she knows him well enough at least to know that it's not aimed at himself. That it never is. 

"Didn't Kinley tell you this? Or was he too preoccupied with how I have caused destruction and terror since the beginning of time?"

"Lucifer, please."

The hard knot of shame in her belly coils, twists.

"I wanted free will," he says eventually, gentler now. "Accountability. To not be a weapon of my father's design."

Chloe nods.

"My war was a spectacular failure of course," he continues while serving them both a refill. She is grateful, both for the alcohol and for not having to dive any further into her own embarrassment. "Michael, my brother, led the army against me. He won. I was cast out. And then, to add further to my eternal punishment, later there was a lovely story about the serpent in the Garden.” 

She drinks up, looks firmly at him.  
  
“It sounds to me like you thought you were doing a good thing.”  
  
“No.” He laughs bitterly. His hands twitch slightly around the glass of single malt. “Oh, no. I didn’t think I was doing a good thing, Detective. I did it out of spite. Out of pride. There she was, my Father’s creation, a mindless cretin who followed the bloody absurd rules of Eden. It had been so easy to just let her _be_.”

“Well, she told me you were the only one who asked her what _she_ wanted.” The way Eve had said it, the _ardor_ in her tone, had landed like a hot jolt of affection somewhere in Chloe’s chest and the warmth of it hasn’t gone completely.  
  
Lucifer exhales, takes another mouthful of his drink. “Of course she did."  
  
Was he the same then? Did he look like this? A wayward creature with power seeping out of his skin - she sees it, oh she understands that she has seen it since they first met now that she _knows_ \- and all of his emotions wrapped in protective layers. Had he been just as magnetic as he is to her at this moment? As he is to her _finally_ , after all this time.   
  
“I don’t think it was just spite, Lucifer. I don't buy it, it doesn't hold up.” Chloe tugs a strand of hair behind her ear, glancing sideways at her company. “Not then, not now."

"I'm afraid I'm not a misunderstood romantic hero, Detective."

"Oh, I can _assure_ you that I never once thought you were. A playboy, sure. A compulsive liar with some real issues, _definitely_. So this-" she nods at him, grinning almost despite herself. "This actual Devil thing - this is an improvement."

That earns her a tucked-in smile in return.

Small steps, small mercies. The dull ache in her chest lets up.

"Eve really cares about you," she says. 

He sits quiet for a while, spinning the remains of whiskey in his glass that glitters in the light from the bar.  
  
"Yes. I don't know that I deserve it but she does."  
  
“You do. Of course you do,” she says, very softly and against all better judgement, says it without looking at him because the thought alone is an unrest in her. Then she finishes her own drink and picks up the tablet she had brought over earlier, outlining their latest case. “I’ll let you know, um, when the lab has any more to go on. Yeah?”  
  
Her own words stings in her mind, sharp little edges at the back of her thoughts.  
  
_I wish I knew how to love you._  
  
Lucifer looks up; for half a heartbeat their eyes lock and she thinks _maybe I do_ , but then he nods curtly and begins serving himself another drink while she hurries up the stairs, out into the light. 

* * *

Her first mortal life drags on, an unbroken chain of survival, of labor and hardships. They struggle side by side but not together, lose their children to sin, to follies, to life. When Abel dies, Adam blames her; she doesn’t understand why but she blames him in return, if only ever half as much as she blames herself. When Abel dies, something inside Eve dies, too. The last illusion, perhaps, the last desperate denial of the nature of her legacy.  
  
Her second mortal life is fragile and thorny, conditional in a way that brings her no respite.  
  
Lucifer is the one thing that does.  
  
In the Garden of Eden he is a rupture in the air as he moves towards her, a slice of creation itself and so cruelly, chillingly _perfect_ that it breaks her heart. She follows him, she would follow him anywhere for the words that roll off his tongue, the irreverence and delight he offers. He’s on his knees before her, worshiping at her altar of false gods and she digs her nails into his back, her teeth into his shoulder and breaks all her unspoken oaths with eyes wide open. 

In the City of Angels, where she arrives with a bang, he is suddenly more human than she is. The broken balance is unsettling; she has never before imagined him being _contained_ by anything and now it seems like sacrilege that he is. She catches him hesitating, holding back; she mentions it gently, harshly, _repeatedly_ with tender fingers outlining every imagined scar of his hellish body and each injustice imposed on the angelic one.   
  
“Of course I am,” he answers one day, for once impatient with her and his nerves on _edge_ ; he’s been at work, she can practically smell all the petty human restrictions on his skin. All the limits they impose on the mightiest creature that walks the Earth. Everything he lets humans _do_ to him. “I could destroy this city in a moment unless I held back.”  
  
“But they don’t understand what you are. They’re human.”  
  
“So are you,” he reminds her, his voice hardening a little every time.  
  
Eve is patient. Eve is kind.  
  
Eve listens to everything he doesn’t tell her those long afternoons in bed with her legs around his waist and his hands casually playing with her hair. She hears the full story of the Detective he loves, pieces it together from the way he speaks of her, from the scattered clues that lie before her, from the look of rejection, of _betrayal_ in Lucifer’s eyes. They always turn on him, his design is cruel that way.  
  
“How very Samson and Delilah.”  
  
“Don’t.” Lucifer scoffs, hands freezing in their movements. “I am bloody well _not_ Samson.”

She chuckles, low and dark.  
  
“No, you’re Prometheus,” she mumbles with her lips against the hollow of his throat where he smells of cologne and warmth, a steadily burning fire. “And I’m your Pandora.”  
  
She fell. Perhaps she jumped over the edge. 

The consequences remain the same.

They suffer so endlessly down here, she always knew, she never _knew_ . Every day a new horror. Abel dies, his broken body in her arms; Cain looks at her, his gaze as stony as the rock in his hand and she curses him, spits on him, hates him as devastatingly as she loves his brother but the fault is hers, the blame is hers. _You will leave this place_ she tells her firstborn, the boy who grew to the rhythm of her heartbeats; _you are no longer welcome here_. 

For the rest of her hopeless, endless life she measures the distance between them and where he eventually lives, keeping the names of his sons and daughters as the only prayer on her lips.

 _Avenge them_ , she thinks now with Lucifer by her side, not taking her eyes off his face when the divine punishment floods his features, watching with delight how all the perfect imperfections of his body are erased by wrath, by justice. _Let him burn._  
  
_Punish us_. 

And _after_ , that almost audible crack in him when he fully understands what he has done, the depths of darkness he's once again uncovered. She feels a rush of regret as he calls anonymously for an ambulance half-way home and she can hear in every syllable he speaks that his determination falters. She kisses him then, kisses him until his Devil face returns and she groans into his mouth. 

And _after_ , with Lucifer going down on her against a wall in a suspicious back alley, she feels _cleansed_ , feels the relief, the power, the magnitude of her attraction to him wash over her like a flood. His force envelops them all and she can’t imagine something she’d rather give in to. 

And _after_ , only days later, on the balcony where she knows she will lose him. Knows it when she sees Chloe’s shoulder touch Lucifer’s, sees his adoration, his utter _reverence_ for the woman who just fell from whatever pedestal he must have placed her on.  
  
Eve knows what it’s like to fall; knows the shapes and sounds of the crash, the shift that follows. She knows nothing about being loved for it and the jealousy claws at her, hot and harsh.  
  
Lucifer, who made stars and music at the dawn of time. Now he stands here and looks at Chloe like she’s the only important matter in the universe, the material he'll use to reshape the world itself.  
  
Their story is written in the unbroken lines between their bodies.  
  
But stories, Eve knows better than most, can be re-told.  
  


* * *

  
  
  
He doesn't look at Trixie in the car.

Doesn't look at Chloe either, he pretends he needs to keep his eyes on the road, his face closed and his head clear. 

They would have killed her. The one fucking thing in his life that is bright and lovely, that isn't a pathetic joke and they would have - 

He can't even _think_ it, just like he can't think about Charlotte lately; it feels as if she'd be able to see him if he did. Like he'd give her access, let her in. Let her watch him in all his damned misery, the corrupt cop that never learned. He should have let Malcolm kill him. The notion is bitter but it hits with a force reserved for truths, hits _blindingly_.  
  
He should have. 

This is what he is. The taste of fire in his throat, the weight of _death_ in his lungs.  
  
This is the man that Daniel Espinoza became in the end, just like at least half of his high school teachers had expected. Disappointment intertwines with panic that breeds contempt that makes him choke up. Beside him Chloe places a hand briefly on his arm and he nearly flinches, almost pulls away in horror. 

Trixie would have died and it would have been his fault.

The road ahead stretches and blurs.  
  
_Why isn’t it over? When does it stop?_

When he looks down at his own hands clutching the wheel, he realizes he’s shaking.  
  
That he’s still shaking hours later, throwing himself at Ella like she’s salvation made flesh, pretending it could be something real between them, pretending he isn’t merely dragging her with him as he crashes and burns - and _lives_ because he gets away with anything. 

* * *

  
  


The baby kicks like a little tornado - _he doesn’t have wings, no wings for your baby Linda, he's just healthy and strong_ \- all the way to Lucifer's penthouse. In the cab, just outside, he finally stops, goes to sleep. Linda strokes her belly in that ancient, timeless gesture she's seen in so many women before her, as she opens the door to _Lux_ and enters. 

Downstairs the party has started but she knows he isn't there tonight.

_Need help. At home. please._

In combination with Chloe’s voice message earlier, it had made Linda change out of her pajamas, grab a cup of tea on the way and _go_. 

“Is everything okay?” she asks the uncharacteristically dark room even if she already knows the answer. Dramatic as he undoubtedly is, he respects her private life, her private time.  
  
“You have to help me, doctor.” In the corner of the couch he looks small against the magnificent backdrop, looks like a child waiting to be berated by an abusive parent; a faded light surrounds him. The stress reaction eats away at his speech, his movements. _Oh_ , she thinks. _Oh no_. “I don’t want to be a monster.”  
  
And then the wings.  
  
The wings are awful, there is no point in denying the obvious. They spread out before her and she thinks of Hell, of guilt, of her own gut-wrenching knowledge that this is the place that will welcome her once she dies. She looks at the monster he considers himself to be and wants to _cry_ .  
  
She doesn’t. 

She walks up to him, to the Devil, tilting her head as she watches him. The sensation in the air - a low, shivering kind of electricity, _yes_ Amenadiel has shown her several times and _yes_ she might find it _sensual_ but that's neither here nor there - that accompanies an angel’s wings is still present but it’s tied to a deeper, darker sense of dread. If the bright glow on an angel moves you and reminds you of divinity, this invokes the memory of guilt, of trespasses. It touches your soul, but chills it to the core.   
  
“You’re not a monster, Lucifer,” she says levelly.  
  
“Really?” Lucifer laughs, a harsh and cold sound. His wings disappear with a whooshing sound. The room seems different without the sight of them. “ _Really_ ?”  
  
He’s pacing the floor, frantically, wringing his hands or raking them through his disheveled hair. The distress is burrowing in his flesh, under his skin, and he tries to self-soothe by constantly moving.  
  
“Really.”  
  
“What would you call the _abomination_ you just witnessed then?”  
  
“I would call him the devil as you see him. As _you_ see you.”  
  
A low, disbelieving growl from him as he stops pacing and slumps down on the couch again, burying his head in his hands. “Self- _bloody_ -actualization. But that’s not true. That’s not _true_ , doctor.”  
  
He isn’t even drinking, there are no signs of it anywhere. She has never witnessed him in a state where he doesn’t passionately self-medicate. There is nothing around to take the edges off _anything_ and it’s ironic that he chooses this moment to face his issues head-on.  
  
“This is who I am,” he says, voice cracking. “This is who I _am_. This is who I-”  
  
“ _Lucifer_.” Linda scoots a little bit closer. “Lucifer, would it be alright if I touch you?”  
  
“What?” he looks utterly out of his depth, like she’s asked him to rearrange the sky - which, come to think of it is something he’d likely find less absurd than coping with psychological stress reactions and trauma responses. Then he nods. “Yes.”  
  
Her hand, tentatively, on his shoulder. He doesn’t flinch or turn away so she lets it remain there, lingers near his body but keeps a distance. It does seem to calm him down. She pats him gently, like she would a child. 

“What does He want from me? Does He want me to be a monster? What is wrong with me, huh, doctor? Why am I like this?”  
  
“Well-” She thinks of all the medical terms he refuses to listen to, think of drugs that won’t work on him, thinks of the multitude of _unthought known_ he contains, those patterns she still itches to reveal and unravel. She could tell him about fight or flight, about physical reactions to psychological shock but she knows it won't help. And why would it? He’s not human.  
  
“Why can’t I get better? Why doesn’t it _end_ ?” One of his hands gets stuck in his hair, the other one reaches for hers. Linda holds it out for him and he grabs it, instinctively. “Is this the purpose of my bloody existence? Because I can’t bear it any more, Linda. I can’t. I _can’t_ .”  
  
She thinks of all the steps she would follow, had this been any other patient reaching out to her late at night in this _frazzled_ state of mind. Thinks about hospitals and those terrible chairs they have where someone like her would be seated until someone like him had spoken to the right person and told them everything.  
  
What they have on their hands here is different.  
  
“Lucifer,” she says softly, stroking his back. “This is not what I’d normally suggest but right now, I think you should have a very, _very_ large drink.”  
  
When he makes no move to go and actually get it, she pushes to her feet and brings the drink to him. Like any doctor worth her salt.  
  
He downs it in one go. She refills his glass.  
  
Ten minutes later he has stopped clawing at his back and twisting his fingers into his hair.  
  
She pours him another drink. Tells him the story of when Maze terrified a neighbor by practicing with her demon blades in the backyard, accidentally chopping off three apple trees and one rosebush.  
  
An hour later he sits peacefully, leaning his head against the back of the couch; his hands are fidgeting with his discarded jacket beside him as well as with an old medical handbook he’s brought from his vast collection of antiquities upstairs. As always, Linda’s mouth practically _waters_ just thinking about the cultural heritage that lives here at _Lux_ , unknown and unprotected.  
  
He has another drink, then two more. It’s not the first time she watches him binge an absurd amount of alcohol but it’s the first time she has the opportunity to study his supernatural capacity for it.  
  
Another hour passes by.  
  
They go over medical discoveries he remembers from the last few centuries, the long-buried origins of modern sciences; she asks him to tell her stories of early civilizations, of the Roman Empire, asks him how many of the former presidents he’s met in Hell. Things she knows he likes to discuss, roads he doesn’t mind walking.   
  
For every story, he winds down a bit more. Not so unlike a human in this, at least.  
  
“Freud was a bit bonkers,” he declares, leafing through the last pages of the handbook.  
  
Linda smiles to herself, battling the sleepiness by mentally going over the notes in Lucifer’s journal as she remembers them. It’s becoming a little muddled now that dawn approaches and every thought moves slowly through her brain.  
  
“Well, he was. And he wasn’t.” She yawns, losing the trail of thought.  
  
“Did you meet him?” His voice has recovered, regained the sarcasm that is partly his coping mechanism but also, she knows by know, partly his personality. “ _Definitely_ bonkers. Delightful company, though. Good in bed - not that I shag and tell.”  
  
Twenty minutes later dawn breaks and he suddenly stands up, looking bewildered. 

“Doctor, you are exhausted. And that - _spawn -_ you carry in your body, surely it requires food?”  
  
“Actually, it-”  
  
“Oh, don’t tell me any grotesque details of how the hell - well, _heaven_ -beast feed off your inner organs, I don't know how it works and I don't care, just lie down here and let me take care of things.”

She struggles a bit to get to her feet but wobbles backwards instead, with a heavy sigh. And gives up. When she considers it and _especially_ when she sees Lucifer’s face fully composed and even somewhat amused as he stares at her like he’s expecting her to pop out her baby on his Italian leather couch - now wouldn’t _that_ be a grand finale to this night - she gives in to her own physical needs.  
  
Those are in order: rest, food and sleep.  
  
Before she knows it, she finds herself dozing off on the couch while Lucifer unpacks the contents of a huge paper bag. There’s a wide variety of things and she vaguely recollects having agreed to some sort of juice as well as bread. She hopes that she agreed to bread.  
  
When she sits up and sees the table she realizes that regardless of what she may have agreed to Lucifer has bought a little bit of everything, just in case. It warms her heart.  
  
“Thank you, Linda.” He gives her a small, self-conscious smile that is quickly replaced by his usual one. “Thank you for so graciously coming over last night.”  
  
“Of course.” She closes her eyes at the divine - pun intended she supposes - scent of fresh croissants and buttery scones. Oh, blessed be the carbs. “I’m glad you asked me to.”  
  
“I’m not cured, though, am I?”  
  
“No.” Linda shakes her head. “No, Lucifer, you’re not. Therapy doesn’t really work that way.”  
  
“It really bloody _should_ by now.” He pours half a bottle of whiskey into his mug of coffee and looks at her over the rim of it. “You’ve been at it for centuries.”

  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
What seems to be one of the worst days in Lucifer’s life - or at least in the tiny slice of life he has shared with them here in LA - is, coincidentally, the day when Chloe understands that they can _do_ this.  
  
That _she_ can do this.  
  
He looks at her with such despair that it twists its way inside her lungs, her _heart_ , but she opens her mouth and tells him it will be okay, that they will work it out, that she’s got him covered.  
  
“Hey,” she says and grabs his arm as they walk down the stairs to the masquerade she has helped organize, putting her very dormant party planner skills to use. It’s been soothing, strengthening, to know that she can provide for him. _I have a certain skill-set_ , he says confidently in her memory and she smiles at it now, her hand on Lucifer’s gloved one. He certainly does. And well, so does she. “This will be okay.”  
  
“Of course, Detective. What’s a little devilish flare-up among partners and a nightclub full of humans.”  
  
Chloe pats his hand. “Just relax. I’ll go get you a drink.”  
  
“Don’t forget the straw,” he says and she can practically _hear_ the shudder in his voice. 

But they manage. They socialize, they keep to themselves and they even dance for a moment though it’s oddly awkward what with Lucifer trying his best not to touch her at all and Chloe accidentally stomping on his feet twice.  
  
“Thank you,” he tells her a while later, voice less strained, more gentle. “This was exactly what I needed.”  
  
She _beams_ , unable to contain the relief in her body.  
  
And then, his powers burn beyond his control, burn terrifyingly around them all and Chloe understands for the first time how deep they go, how vast they are. The things she has seen over this past year, the way he had held a moving car, the image of him walking out of a burning house, the surge of wrath at Tiernan’s house - everything pile at her feet now and she sees it through him, the torrent of celestial might that is released when he can’t sustain it any longer.   
  
It is truly, unequivocally terrifying to witness.  
  
But she doesn’t look away.  
  
She doesn’t look away later when he stands before her, in full devil transformation and with eyes that carry so many griefs that she wonders if he can even count them. Only a few days ago she had thought of the future when he’d be different. An angel again, perhaps. Or the Devil, but a good one. Her heart had painted beautiful, gentle pictures of the man she wishes he was. _I don’t like how that makes me feel, either,_ he had said and she had kept herself awake all night, hearing him in her head over and over and over.  
  
It had hurt, an angry sort of disappointment settling deep inside her, to realize that Lucifer isn’t what she wants him to be. That he is what _he_ wants him to be. And that she can either love that man or walk away.  
  
It still hurts but the hurt isn’t for her this time, it reaches out to him. There's a shattering amount of pain between them but the weight of it lies on him, slumping down heavily on his frame. She wants to shoulder a part of it, release the rest.  
  
She wants, she wants, she _wants_ .  
  
“This isn’t about me,” she says and it _isn’t_ .  
  
And then, the Devil disappears.  
  
Chloe watches him fight through what she can only assume is a lifetime of hate for the man he is, fight through until he reaches the far edges of the man he would like to be. She can see how it hurts, can read a million different kinds of pain in the hunched shoulders and his face, oh his _face_ .  
  
“You’re okay,” she breathes.  
  
They’re okay.  
  
He is the Devil and she _loves_ him.  


* * *

  
  
  
  
Eve stands in a church when it becomes abundantly clear to her that she has probably condemned the second version of her mortal self to Hell. 

It would be _ironic_ if it wasn't already so terribly, dreadfully desperate around her and _Lucifer_ , her heart sinks so far down she wonders if it will stop beating, Lucifer is being gathered by his demons to return to the place he had left, she knows as much.

He has told her how Hell has been his torment for an eternity, how it has ground down his thoughts, his emotions, his sense of self. How it might very well be the place he is meant for, created for, but that he cannot _stand_ it all the same. _All I want is to be my own man. Make my own choices. Be held accountable for my own sins, not humanity’s._

He has told her this and she has nodded, understood because being with Adam in Heaven had felt how he describes his millennia down in Hell. She knows the terror in finding that you are washed out, every colour in the fabric that once made you suddenly faded and pale, the patterns unrecognizable.  
  
She _knows_. 

Now she stands in a church and hears demons handle a baby, someone else's baby, and thinks of punishment, of justice.

 _Oh, please forgive me,_ she thinks before the demon wearing Father Kinley’s face hits her over the head and the world turns pitch-black in a second.

* * *

  
Dromos.  
  
Maze spits on the pavement outside the Mayan, trying to remove the taste of ashes from her mouth.  
  
Of course it’s fucking _Dromos_ . Oh, she’ll enjoy gutting him, she’ll even make a point of doing it before Lucifer has time to incinerate him like she’s sure he’s set on doing. Man, when he made all his laws down there there had been riots. And he had put them down with a cruelty she had never seen in him for all the years she’s been by his side.  
  
The demons ought to remember, she thinks as they enter the building. They should know by now that the King of Hell picked his side a long time ago.  
  
She wonders what bullshit they have planned, what traps they’ll try to trick him into; as they fight their way through the room Maze make bold guesses in her head and delivers her blows with a nostalgic joy that soars through her entire body.  
  
And then the King of Hell returns with a vengeance.  
  
“You will bow down to your king!” he growls and she won’t deny the little surge of delight rushing through her as all the demons fall to their knees before him but she - Mazikeen of the Lilim - remains unbowed.  
  
Afterwards, they smoke together while the humans scurry about trying to make a decent cover-up story about the bodies in the Mayan. Lucifer looks at her; she raises an eyebrow.  
  
“You’re going back,” she says. It’s not a question, she’s not _stupid_ .  
  
Five years of her arguments, her fights, her plots are nothing compared to this.  
  
He doesn’t ask if she wants to come. She doesn’t suggest it. They both know she’s more needed here with Charlie, with Trixie, with Decker who was about to break all of her uptight rules about public displays of affection in there, before the demon horde had interrupted.  
  
“We need to talk about a prophecy,” he says and drags smoke into his lungs. In the city lights he casts broken shadows on the ground; his face is calm, composed, _devastated_ . “And I want to ask a favor of you, if I may.”   
  
Maze nods. 

* * *

  
Azrael learns about her brother’s descent into Hell when the dimensions snap shut around it.  
  
Learns it with a jolt of pain, a shock to her senses and she knows that all her siblings must have felt it this time, just like they did the last time Hell wrapped their brother in its arms and carried him away. Just like they all had felt the loss of Uriel, a collective sigh of grief that spread across the realm. This time it’s different, though, the movements in the dimensions are more violent and their echoes speak of war.  
  
_Amenadiel_ , she calls in her mind. _Duma_ .  
  
_Castiel, I want my blade back._ _  
_ _  
_ _Michael. What did you do now?_  
  
Then she takes a seat just outside the Gates of Heaven, _waiting_. 

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this story will have a couple of more chapters than I thought. It won’t be a huge plotty fic but I’m going to touch on some things now that we’re all done with canon so far. 
> 
> Future chapters will NOT be 10K each, though. Er. Most likely.
> 
> Also thanks to [ Arlome](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arlome/pseuds/Arlome) for talking me through some episodes and being awesomely bright.


	4. Five People You Meet on Your Way to Hell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Oh man, you think you’re _Jesus_ now?”

_"Would the Lord of Hell destroy his realm? Would the Lord of Hell ever free the souls held in torment? Would the Lord of Hell expel the never-born? Would the Lord of Hell abandon the war with Heaven?"  
_"The Lord of Hell will do what he damn well likes."

The demon Ketele and Lucifer, in _Sandman_ #23: "Seasons of Mist: episode 2"

* * *

**I.**

  
  
“How much do you owe him?”  
  
“What the hell are you talking about?” Dan’s head hurts, his throat is dry and his body pounds with the hangover he’s barely even able to _contain_ at this point. "Who?"  
  
“Tiernan.” Lucifer doesn’t move but there’s a sudden impression of physical threat all the same, as though his body grows in the shadows. The air shifts uncomfortably around them.  
  
“I would assume he asks for more than thirty pieces of silver, eh?”  
  
His mind is numb, sore with recent misery and mistakes and the words that struggle out of him are splinters of it.  
  
“Oh man, you think you’re _Jesus_ now?” he spits.  
  
“ _Wrong_.”  
  
A dimension of darkness Dan has never seen before in his life fills Lucifer’s entire expression. Something quietly explodes or floods; he takes a step closer and Dan blinks, tries to look away from the gaze that cracks wide-open and flashes red, just for a fraction of a moment but it’s there, isn’t it? Yeah. He blinks. It’s _there_.  
  
A red fire, deep and beckoning. It looks like it comes from within the man himself and suddenly he _knows_ , knows things he has refused to know for all this time, knows with a shattering certainty that all the evidence he has tried to rationalise away have been real, have held up.  
  
Lucifer scoffs and there’s nothing benevolent in it, no trace of humorous banter. Dan figures attempted murder quickly erases that between two people.  
  
“It wasn’t me you betrayed, Daniel. I don’t care if you send a thousand thugs after _me_.”

A memory flashes: a bathhouse and a lie, or what Dan initially had assumed was one. _Yes, believe me when I say, Boris, that the world would be a better place without him._ It had gradually morphed into something far worse because Dan knows a hell of a lot about lying but the straight-faced self-loathing had wormed its way under his own defenses and festered there, like an unsolved case.  
  
Well, he guesses the case is about to blow wide-open now. _  
_  
“Look - I-”  
  
“Don't give me pathetic _excuses_!” Lucifer’s eyes flash again, deep and dark and Dan looks away, his gaze straying to the wall, the messy desk, the stress-relieving equipment thrown on the floor. “Be _better_ than that. Own your actions."  
  
_Yeah, that’s a real easy one right there._ But even through the hazed panic and hurt disbelief that colors everything about this, there is no denying the sheer magnitude in Lucifer's voice, the submission Dan feels at the commanding tone.  
  
He lets out a shaky breath. “I’m _sorry_. Okay. I didn’t know.”  
  
“What? That there would be _innocent people_ at Lux? Or that I could have company?” Lucifer’s voice is cold, ice that burns against Dan’s shame, the defeat rising like bile in his throat. “Then you are infinitely more stupid than even I would have imagined.”  
  
"Yeah." He rubs over his forehead with his thumbs, feeling parched. The glass of water on his desk is nearly empty and he looks around, as if a new one would magically present itself to him. Like he’s the one with goddamn super powers. “Yeah, I am. I’m a goddamn idiot, Lucifer, I figured you of all people would know that.”  
  
“Don’t be. You can’t afford it.” Lucifer scoffs again, softer now. He steps out of the shadows and Dan no longer feels his anger in the room. “Trust me, I of all people would know _that_ .”  
  
“I guess you do.”  
  
Oh shit, he thinks, the word ‘damned’ hitting him like a punch in the gut. Damned. Charlotte had said that, too, used that exact word one night after he had woken her up and held her through the afterimages of her inner torment. _Damned_ . A word that had felt misplaced and old-fashioned but she had spoken it with tears in her eyes. She had been sweaty and terrified, crying against his shoulder and Dan had ran his hand down her back saying _there’s no hell for you, Charlie, you’re one of the good guys_ . What had he known, what authority had he imagined himself to be? Oh, Charlotte.  
  
Oh, Jesus _Christ_ .  
  
Dan glances up at the other man, still reeling from what he almost-knows, the questions forming themselves in his mouth but they don’t make it out, he can’t bring himself to ask. If Amenadiel had been right, that she’s in Heaven.  
  
“I’ve always been honest,” Lucifer says in his place. “Everything I’ve said has been true. I’m the Devil.”  
  
“It’s just…” Dan shakes his head. “ _Fuck_ , man.”  
  
“Not right now, thanks.”  
  
Dan startles, almost _chokes_ at the stupid joke, the impossible timing of it, the stubbornness in this weird guy and his attitude. Dan’s mind takes another sharp turn, leaving him nauseous. Because that’s just it. The _attitude_ . His way of waltzing into their lives, pretending to be a civilian consultant when none of it is true and -  
  
“Chloe,” he manages. “God, _Trixie_ .”  
  
“What about them?”  
  
“You’re…” he stops himself.  
  
“If you’re thinking that I would hurt them-” Lucifer’s voice is steely, a hard layer of conviction outlining it. “I would do anything for them, Daniel. _Everything_ . They’re…”  
  
“No, I didn’t mean that.” He wonders if the unspoken word would be _family_ , wonders how it would cut, where it would _hurt_ hearing it out loud. Everything inside him is a taut, terrified scream; he can’t tell one sensation from another. “I mean, they know, don’t they?”

A nod, a pained expression that quickly passes away into the composure Lucifer seems to consist of tonight. Hard lines, firm posture, a gaze that reveals nothing but determination.  
  
“So what now?”  
  
Lucifer lets out a breath, looking at Dan for a beat. “Now, I want to know exactly how bloody messed up your dealings with Tiernan are.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“So I know how much cash you need.”

Chloe has told him a couple of times in passing that Lucifer probably funds a fifth of all good-looking and financially unfortunate college students' education. That he buys cars as gifts, that he passes away checks like they're notes in class and Dan has thought she's telling him this to prove her point but the only thing is does to him is cement the hatred he already has for wealthy bastards.

 _Money means nothing to me_ , Lucifer tells him in a distant memory.

Dan had seethed back then. The level of goddamn privilege you must possess to make that kind of statement.

Money _means_ nothing to him, he realizes now. And of course it doesn't. 

“Lucifer, what the hell-”  
  
“Ironic you should say that, since that’s where I’m headed. I’m in a bit of a hurry, actually. So-” he looks pointedly at Dan. “Tell me.”  
  
“Look, I only told Tiernan that you…” he trails off, resorting to vague and pathetic gestures.  
  
“Broke his cockroach of a son’s spine?”  
  
Dan nods, swallowing hard before he continues. The callous coldness it must take to carry out such a thing. He doesn't even want to imagine it. _Hits too close to home, eh, Espinoza?_ “I was so angry, you have to understand how pissed off I was at you, Lucifer.”  
  
“That’s not important now.” The other man gestures dismissively. “I’m not saying I don’t deserve it-”  
  
“You don’t, actually.” Lucifer gives him an odd look that Dan chooses to ignore, pushing away the discomfort. “But I wasn’t involved in anything beyond tipping him off. Gave him your name. There’s no money involved. If that’s what you mean?”  
  
“That’s what I mean. And I’m positively surprised Detective Douche hasn’t dealt in blood money. Maybe there’s hope for you yet.”  
  
Dan lets out a helplessly bitter chuckle, thinking about the orchestrated hit on Perry Smith, about the corners he’s cut recently, about the cheats he’s always used because he’s got a thick streak of greed ruining his mind. It’s a greed obsessed not with wealth but with proving himself, proving everyone _wrong_ . He rolls his chair a little further back, leans forward and buries his head in his hands. There’s a little voice in his head wondering how many times Lucifer has witnessed people sit like this, full of shame and guilt and stupidity. Or maybe it doesn’t work that way at all? Does he want to know?  
  
“Hell is real,” he says, and it’s not a question because he can practically _feel_ the truth in his bones, the carved-in messages of every memory he shares with Charlotte; her past had tinged every step of her present with a sadness he never really understood until it was too late. 

_It was like being stuck in a nightmare. Of my own doing.  
  
_ He glances up at Lucifer, half-hoping the guy would announce that the eyes and the wrath from before were just part of an elaborate practical joke at Dan’s expense, another one of those _he’s trying to be your friend_ -set-ups that Chloe seriously believes in even if all of them end with people laughing _with_ Lucifer _at_ Dan. 

“Yes.”  
  
“And I’m going there.”  
  
“At this rate, absolutely.” Lucifer looks at him with something that for once, after all the stupid bullshit pranks and patronizing jokes the man - _Devil_ , he supposes - has pulled on him, resembles pity. It makes Dan want to hurl a chair out of the unbreakable window.  
  
“How am I supposed to deal with that?” he asks instead and he hears his own voice like a small boy’s, pleading with an adult for answers.  
  
He expects Lucifer to crack another badly timed joke or throw him off with his brand of insults spoken in a British accent that seems to charm everyone - Dan mostly excluded.  
  
“You’re not a bad man, Daniel, trust me on this.” Lucifer picks up a pen from the desk and spins it in his hand, doing a few things that Dan is confident must be possible only because the Devil has super powers. “A douche, yes. A douche who could do a lot better if he stopped pitying himself for his own selfish decisions, indeed. But you’re not evil. You’re not damned.”  
  
Dan shakes his head and a ragged breath twists its way out of his lungs.  
  
“It’s just - _man_ , the bullshit I’ve gotten away with. You have no idea.”  
  
“I do, actually.”  
  
Looking up, he can see that Lucifer means it; he can’t bring himself to ask why, ask how, ask _who told you_. After a beat, he banishes that loop of thoughts entirely. It doesn’t matter. This is all on him. Linda would be proud. 

“Hell is _guilt_ ,” Lucifer says. “Self-pity doesn’t work on guilt. Neither does wrath. I’ve tried.”  
  
There’s a whole world of questions running beneath their conversation, Dan thinks, a _universe_ where Lucifer is the goddamn _Devil_ and supposedly leading this immortal existence. But in this life that they share, in this slice of the other man’s weird, unfathomable lifespan where he’s a consultant at the precinct and Chloe’s… friend, none of that surreal shit really matters. Does it?  
  
“Wait, so Satan is telling me to forgive myself?”  
  
“Yes.” Lucifer frowns and pauses for a beat, as if something sinks in. “I suppose he is.”

* * *

**II.  
**

She’s going through updates from the _Mayan_ case that had brought her back from a planned journey down to the grocery store to pick up some beer and chips and instead planted her firmly here at the precinct. It’s still deserted apart from Dan and a handful of others that Chloe had considered safe. _I'll explain later_ , she had texted.  
  
So many bodies to explain, too, that Ella’s mind boggles, spins with the possibilities and consequences.  
  
She’s on her third mug of coffee since coming in so everything’s even more frenzied than usual, her thoughts wrapped around themselves like spider legs, her stomach jittery and her hands tapping rhythms on the photographs she’s staring at.  
  
It _could_ be that.  
  
Damn it, she would have liked it if it _was_ that.  
  
But of course it isn’t. 

It’s a blur of movement at first, too fast for human eyes but she _knows_ again, the truths slipping back through the tears in her consciousness, those flimsy walls she never manages to build. She's known all day in a quasi-conscious sort of way, detail by detail from the tightly covered-up case Chloe's refused to talk about trickling inside her head. Yeah. Ella Lopez is never going to be normal. Might as well roll with it.  
  
_Nothing_ about this is normal anyway.  
  
And when the blur shifts into divine light and then Lucifer, standing by the open window like he’s just walked in there when she wasn’t watching.  
  
“Either that’s some high-level method acting stick, pal, or you’re -” she cuts herself off, mouth opening but the words refusing to leave. She knows. She sees. She should have understood earlier.  
  
“Not human,” he fills in, his voice oddly calm and neutral in a way she hasn’t heard it before. Like he’s a different creature body and soul. Then the wings disappear and he stands in front of her as Lucifer, _the civilian consultant from Hell,_ as Dan once dubbed him. Oh man. Oh man, that’s even _funnier_ now. Or incredibly scary. Ella bites her lower lip to stop from bursting into a nervous cackle.  
  
Then she does that exact thing. Cackles. He waits patiently for her to calm down.  
  
She hears Chloe in her head, on her couch, in this very room grasping for threads to tug at for things to make sense, Ella supposes. _He is also an angel._ The brittle hope in her voice then, the way Ella had no place for it, every cavity in her heart full of grief and doubt but Chloe had suddenly possessed faith for them all.  
  
“You’re the _Devil_ .” She leans forward, holding on to the table in front of her. A sturdy, nice table, perfectly normal and non-threatening, devoid of all traits except for its… sturdiness, she guesses.  
  
He nods. “I’ve told you before.”  
  
“Yeah, dude. I mean. _Yeah_ .”   
  
Ella blinks, touches the cross around her neck and notices that Lucifer sees her doing so. Her cheeks flush. She feels - for the first time - embarrassed in his company. For her faith, for her doubts, for her _humanity_ .   
  
“I didn’t want to terrify you, Ms Lopez,” he says, as if he senses what she struggles with, as if he knows her thoughts. Does he? If he does she really must stop thinking so many crazy things. “I’ve told you the truth many times but I didn’t want to show you. I didn’t want -” he sighs, heavily. “I suppose I didn’t want you of all people to think less of me.”  
  
It runs her over like a flood of affection, a rush of love that settles deep and heavy in her chest.  
  
And Ella doesn’t consider her move very carefully when she crosses the floor and throws herself at Satan who stumbles a little before gracefully regaining balance for them both. Her arms around his waist, her face squished against the front of his shirt and he smells of the sky, she thinks, he smells of the sky and he’s God’s most loved angel and _why_ is everything in her life so _strange_?

“I can’t believe you’re actually the Devil,” she mutters. 

“Some days, Ms Lopez, I can’t either.”  
  
She pulls back to look at him to see if he’s joking - he’s _joking_ , surely he is, this guy’s joking about _everything_ \- but his face is serious and calm and Ella frowns.  
  
“You okay?”  
  
“Look,” he says, patting her shoulder awkwardly. “If time was not of importance here I would have loved to have single malt lattes and talk about the depressing reality of my existence, but I have to _go_ .”  
  
“Right.” She nods, frowning again. “Where?”  
  
“Hell. It’s-” Sighing, he runs a hand over his neck, looking forlorn and _done_ , like he's been having this conversation already. Which he probably has.  
  
“A long story?” she offers.  
  
A quick smile ghosts over his face. “I knew you’d understand, Ms Lopez.”  
  
“I do want to have a nice long chat with you, though. When you get back?” As she speaks the words she realizes that the reality he’s facing probably doesn’t involve a nice, quick vacation in Hell. “I mean - Dude, you’re coming _back_ , right?”  
  
His silence is an answer, one that breaks her heart a little bit even in this overall _mess_ that they’re in. Lucifer has been a constant in her life since moving to LA - a very odd, slightly confusing and not always stable constant but even _so_ .  
  
He unleashes his wings again, sweeping a coffee mug off a desk and threatens the existence of yet another one before Ella catches hold of herself enough to run over there and pick it up. Lucifer smiles apologetically.  
  
“Sorry. Not used to these bloody things indoors.”  
  
Then he pulls out a feather from his left wing, grimacing vividly. Ella makes a muffled protest but he keeps plucking two more, then switching to the other wing where he removes several.  
  
And hands them over to her.   
  
They shimmer in her palm. A low hum around them, she imagines, like they’re enchanted. They probably aren’t but they’re definitely _something_ .  
  
“I suppose you have your proof of divinity right here,” he says, catching her staring.  
  
Ella snaps out of the moment and looks up at him.  
  
“Oh, I’ve never _really_ doubted that the Big Guy is _real_. I just didn’t want to have anything to do with Him. Two different crisis of faith modes.”  
  
“It is.” Lucifer looks at her and there’s a softness in his gaze that clashes with the grim determination in everything else, the weary lines that she thinks she must imagine because surely an angel - the _Devil_ \- isn’t affected like a human would be by griefs and hardships.  
  
“Yeah, pal. I… you would know.”  
  
His hand lands on her shoulder, a gentle and reassuring touch as his fingers curl into her tense posture. _What about Chloe_ , she wants to ask. _What about us?_

"Hold on to the feathers," he says. "Just in case."  
  
There are tears welling up in her eyes, she can feel them like tiny pinpricks of betrayal. This might be a defining moment in her life and here she is, crying. It just won’t do. Ella Lopez isn’t going to stand for it.  
  
“In case of what? No, actually, don't tell me. What do-” she loses her voice for a beat, _inhales_ , clears her throat and tries again. “What do you want me to do with them?”

"They are divine, so-"

"Oh,” she cuts him off, eager to do better, be of more _use_ to him. “So they can, to quote a fellow scientist ‘even put a stopper in death’?"  
  
If it’s because he spots her reference or because she’s dazzling him with her understanding of celestial materials, she can’t say but Lucifer chuckles at least and for a moment everything’s bright again, the night around them easing up.  
  
“They can, yes. They also heal wounds from hell-forged blades.”  
  
“Whoa.” Ella isn’t even sure that she, not from all her extensive geek obsessions combined with the accumulated professional experience, can even imagine what that could _mean_ , realistically speaking. Or totally-unrealistically-but-also- _not_ speaking. “I mean. _Whoa_.”  
  
“Stay safe,” Lucifer says than and an urgency she has definitely never heard in him before creeps into the voice, sneaks in like a ghost. “Maze can help if something happens. And Amenadiel-”  
  
“Amenadiel!” The insight is a sudden stumble in her mind. “He’s your brother. He’s, oh boy - he’s-”  
  
“An angel, yes.”  
  
“This is… Lucifer, I just…”  
  
“Ms Lopez - _Ella_. I’m sorry but I have to go.”  
  
His gaze locks with her for a fraction of a second and she takes a step forward; he seems to consider something before he suddenly and for the first time since she met him initiates a hug. A long, warm hug that wraps her in a near-daze as he finally lets go.  
  
She smiles at him, definitely crying now but she doesn’t really care. He smiles back.  
  
And then he’s gone.  
  
Ella leans out of the window and looks at the faintly glowing light, reminiscent of a star but stronger, _warmer_ ; she stares at it until he’s completely invisible.

  
****

* * *

**  
**

**III.  
  
**  
There’s an angel on the porch.  
  
If she had been someone else, she probably would have screamed.  
  
“Wow,” she says instead, gaping at the sight.  
  
“Hello, Trixie.”  
  
“Wow.” Trixie knows she’s been growing a lot lately, getting tall as a tree, but the light of him - the light _around_ him - makes her body feel small. “ _Wings_. And you call me Trixie. Why do you call me Trixie? Has someone died?”  
  
Lucifer looks at her for a long time, like he’s about to say something important, the way her parents sometimes do. Make an announcement. Except here _he’s_ the announcement and she can’t really stop staring. It’s the weirdest thing she has ever seen but it fits inside her, she’s made room for it. Maze has seen to that and a lot of other stuff have helped, really. The world has sort of shifted a little, growing to fit everything that wouldn’t make sense otherwise.  
  
“You have always believed me,” he says, finally.  
  
“Yeah.” She nods. She hadn’t really thought he _noticed_ her knowing - or guessing - but she has always known he sort of does. It’s all very complicated.  
  
“Why?”  
  
“I'm far more intelligent than your average human spawn, remember?” Those are his words, not hers. She’s kept them in her chest, turned them into warm little butterflies that flutter there.  
  
He seems to remember because he chuckles under his breath. “That you are, indeed.”  
  
“Also, I figured since Maze isn’t human you weren’t either.”  
  
It’s weird knowing things that you’re not _supposed_ to know - like the fact that your parents are splitting up because your dad isn’t home enough and because mom is angry with him, quiet-angry, the kind that just sort of lives in the house without words. It’s even weirder knowing things that you’re not supposed to know and nobody else would really _believe_. Like if you see a ghost or have a demon for babysitter.  
  
“Can I touch them?” She says it without thinking, says it even if she’s learned over the years that he doesn’t like to be touched. “The wings? Can I? Please?”  
  
And Lucifer lets her.  
  
He _lets_ her and it’s even more amazing than to touch Maze’s face because these are wings. She barely remembers how to breathe. Soft feathers under her fingers, white and _tingling_ with heat, almost as if there’s a light inside that makes them warm. 

When she steps back she can see that he’s looking at her in that special way again, the sad and _waiting_ kind of way.  
  
“You’re going somewhere, aren’t you? Somewhere bad.”  
  
“Yes.” Lucifer nods.  
  
Trixie _feels_ the answer in her stomach, a painful dance of nerves like those she has before a presentation in school or - very recently - before asking Aisha if she wants to get ice cream after science club on Friday afternoon.  
  
“To Hell?”  
  
He nods again. “Yes.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
If Lucifer had been a grown-up like other grown-ups, this is the moment where he would have told her something silly or said _nothing you have to worry about, monkey_ . Now, Trixie thinks, is the time when he would have brushed off her questions like little breadcrumbs and told her to get her stuff so they could get going to whatever place, anywhere but here. That’s what dad used to do when it was bad between her parents and then again a few months ago when he snapped at Maze and barely let her talk to Lucifer.  
  
But Lucifer isn’t like other grown-ups.  
  
He tilts his head to the side and makes a little grimace as he tells her the truth.  
  
“Because if I don’t return, demons will come to look for me. I can’t let them do that. Well, I could let them have a few humans, I suppose, especially in the White House, but since there’s no way of knowing which ones they’ll snatch. _Well_ .” He makes a vague gesture that Trixie doesn’t know what to think of. “I have to go back and stop them.”  
  
“Okay,” she says, thinking that her voice sounds very worried. She _is_ worried. She doesn’t want him to go and she knows mom doesn't either and by the look of it, Lucifer would also much rather stay here and drink wine and play the piano. “What do _I_ need to do?”  
  
He gives a little chuckle that sounds soft and kind, nothing like being laughed at. When she looks into his eyes they look like mom’s when she watches Trixie at school, or dad’s when she tells him she might become a doctor in the future to help people.  
  
“You need to tell Maze that I had to go without her.”  
  
“She’s not coming with you? Are you going there _alone_?” Trixie folds her arms across her chest, mirroring mom when she’s particularly upset. “Why are you going there alone? Is it because you don’t want Maze to get hurt? Because then I might forgive you.”  
  
“I don’t want her to get hurt.” He sighs. He’s looked sad for most of this year but now he looks different. Sad, but different-sad. “Maze is… very brave. And very stubborn. And I don’t think that’s good right now. Not where I’m going.”  
  
“She’s going to be _so_ mad at you.”  
  
Lucifer nods and the corners of his mouth twitch in a small, sad smile. “That’s why _you_ will tell her.”  
  
“When are you coming back?”  
  
“I don’t know.”  
  
“But you _are_ coming back?”  
  
“I don’t know.”  
  
“Mom will be so upset if you don’t.”  
  
“I -” he looks away for a second; when he meets her gaze again there seems to be tears in his eyes but they are gone again in a second. Maybe they were never there at all. She can never really tell with grown-ups and all their _moods_ . “I will miss her more than I have ever missed anything in my life.”  
  
“And me,” Trixie says and slips into his arms for a hug. She does it without considering that he might not want to, that he usually doesn’t want to. Tonight he doesn’t seem to mind so she doesn’t have to be sorry. Only sad that he might not come back but happy that he said goodbye at least, that he told her the truth. Nobody will ever believe her but who even _cares_? Trixie puts her face against his chest, listening to the heavy heartbeats and thinks it’s so cool that he exists, that she knows him, that he’s someone she can call a friend because Lucifer might be the Devil who lets her do his dirty work but he’s also, hands down, the _best_.  
  
He pats her shoulder and adds, in a very quiet voice: “And you, Beatrice.”  
  


* * *

**IV.**  
  
  
  
God does not love his children equally.  
  
No parent does.  
  
God loves them _all,_ more or less, but each in a different way. And frankly, some of them are rather unlovable creatures that require a bit of work, to say the least. God should know. _You made them in your image_ , _great job husband,_ Goddess would snap at him at times, always referring to the unlovable ones. The engineers of chaos and hurt.   
  
But God loves them. It’s the least God can do.  
  
Some of them God loves patiently or even distantly, like a promise half-forgotten.  
  
Some of them God loves straight-forwardly and without complications, the steady love of the familiar.  
  
Some of them God loves with a weary parent’s quiet desperation and regret. 

The fiery, beautiful angel who became the guardian of all the lost souls of Hell, _oh_ , God loves him with the passion of the stars they once created side by side.  
  
Samael - the brightest, the boldest, the bravest. The heaviest sacrifice ever made. Defiant by design, proud and provocative by the choice he wrestled from Creation itself and angry, unashamedly angry. His wrath would flood the narrow streets of the Silver City, it still echoes in the memories they preserve up there, the well of their history. But it’s the sweetness in him that God loves the most; it’s the sweetness in him that _makes_ him the sacrifice. 

Heaven had loved its lightbringer.  
  
Of course it had.  
  
Heaven is really bloody tolerant about a lot of things.  
  
Well, mostly Heaven awaits God’s signal before it makes any kind of response or judgement so - God likes to point out - it’s _God_ who is really bloody tolerant. The humans don’t even know half of it and that might be for the best, really, considering the way they bulldoze about down here.  
  
God watches the City of Angels tonight - God watches everything all the time but even a celestial being can only pay attention to so much before it starts becoming a blur - because there is a war starting in between all the layers of human pretense and divine patterns. A side note to most. But certainly not to God.  
  
More specifically, God watches a church in the outskirts of the overly bright city.  
  
Oh, they find it awfully ironic - God _thinks_ the definition of ironic begins to snap into place now, they practice often - to see the Lightbringer there, in the middle of what humans call a place of worship. Samael who had refused forgiveness, refused submission, refused God like God always knew he would.  
  
It had hurt nonetheless. God had _not_ counted on that.  
  
“Hello, Father.” Samael stands in the middle of the room, tilting his head back so he’s facing the ceiling. It’s actually quite endearing that he does that, still. They all do. God would like to point out that Heaven isn’t a direction but refrains; the last couple of times God pointed things out everyone got terribly upset and ignited theological debates. God really dislike those; they underline humanity’s limited intellectual progress and make God feel _myötähäpeä_ , _fremdschämen_ **-** second hand embarrassment - to a point where God wants to _scream_.  
  
“Happy now?” Samael glares at Jesus, walks up to the windows that lacks glass and sits down for a moment before pushing to his feet again. Picking up a cigarette and lighting it, he continues. “No of course you’re not happy. That would be _absurd_. You never were happy. You’re never anything at all, are you? Just silent.”  
  
Interventionist, word of the day for Their favorite son.  
  
_Samael_ , God thinks. _I am always here_.   
  
Moments like these God regrets the decision to respect the free will. God had been slightly high on Their own brilliance back when that promise was made but like Samael, God keeps Their promises. Especially promises God has been so _extra_ about. 

“I’m returning to Hell. I thought you would want to know. Accepting my punishment and all that.”  
  
That makes God sigh a little, into the void.   
  
God did not create Hell.  
  
God did not create Hell and had God created Hell it would not have been made as a punishment. 

God did not create Heaven, either, for that matter. God _is_ awfully fond of Heaven, though, and sometimes fails to correct the assumption that They sat down one fine day and molded the Silver City from nothingness. Oh, God would have _liked_ that day.  
  
But no, God did not scrapbook the celestial continents from dust and clay, not exactly. Myths, for all their liberal intents and purposes, are always so definite and constricting and no matter how you look at it, there is always a _before_ .  
  
And in this case, there will be an after. 

Samael will understand, eventually.  
  
“You never spoke to me in Hell so wasn’t sure you heard or saw me there- ” He pauses to draw a breath and God thinks this is where God would feel guilty if God was a creature dragging human emotions around. Luckily God isn’t. Not for very long at any rate. It will leave in God in a blink of an eye, like humans say. “Anyway. You never speak to me up here either. So. Carry on being a mute bastard, I suppose. Wouldn’t want to overcome stereotypes, now would we?”  
  
Samael, lightbringer, morning star.  
  
May I be with you. I bless you. I-speed.  
  
God laughs a little at Their own joke. If there’s one humanly _perfect_ thing God would like to get credit for it’s gallows humor. That, and _Song of Songs_. Well, quite a lot of the Scriptures, actually. For all the stark, raving mad things the men of faith put into them once upon a time, God must admit that they also got some of it very right. Not in a literal sense but in a literary.  
  
God looks at the angel in the church - the angel who thinks himself fallen, thinks himself unforgiven, thinks himself abandoned. Something rumbles in God’s non-corporeal chest.  
  
_I have made you, and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you._  
  
When Samael comes to a halt on his way out of the building, face frozen in disbelief and his eyes burning, God realizes that for once, They _did_ speak.  
  
“Father?” His voice is different, comes from another place altogether. He waits for a moment, followed by another one; he waits for quite a long time, really, and the _rumbling_ doesn't go away. Then he shakes his head, stubs out his cigarette in a mural painting and marches on into his darkness.   
  
God slips back into the great celestial void thinking _oh well_.  
  
No harm done.   
  
Most likely.   


* * *

  
**V.**

  
There is a war for the throne.  
  
That’s what they claim, those who come to flock at her feet, chattering in synchronized pleas and prayers. A dozen fawning demons, lesser and newer ones - not the Lilim of her creation for those would never beg. Or they wouldn’t back then when the universe burned for the first time but she supposes everything softens eventually.  
  
“So?” she asks, leaning down to grab hold of one of the demons in the front; she lifts her up by the leather straps of her clothing and stares into the dark, icy cold gaze of a hellbound creature. “I am no angel.”  
  
“M-m-maybe the rules can change, mistress.” The demon spits blood on the ground. It must have been a rough journey all the way to the outskirts of the Old World, most off-worlders never even make it here. “They - they say the King w-wants out.”  
  
Lilith drops the visitor back where she belongs and rises, once more, to behold the pathetic makeshift court of creatures before her.  
  
_Samael_ . They had fought side by side for a brief moment, his sword coupled with her might and the realities shattered around them. She can still taste their war in Heaven on the back of her tongue, can still taste _him_ , burning with righteousness and despair, later with wrath and revenge. Or perhaps it was always everything at once.  
  
She had been fond of him, the lightbringer. He had carried his destiny with a broken grace.  
  
"If the King of Hell wants out," she mutters, "the war isn't over a bloody _throne_ ."  
  
The moronic demons stare in disbelief; Lilith turns on her heel and leaves.

\---

_Samael_.

There at the precipice of his defeat he glowers at her over his broken sword, wings bloodied and dirty and his voice hard. Transforming itself to fit a fallen angel, she thinks with a jolt of unexpected pity. He had never expected to lose; he has always seen his own victory as a certainty, like a Seer hopelessly raging against the outlines of his reality. 

“My brother will be here soon,” he tells her. “You’d do best to escape before that.”  
  
“And you? Will you stay for your father's judgement?”

He doesn't answer; Lilith gives a laugh, dark and angry. 

“Samael. Lucifer. Are you letting _Michael_ best you?”  
  
“I am not. There is only one being I acknowledge as my superior. He alone possesses powers that supersedes mine.”   
  
“And so you will wait here on your knees for His wrath?”  
  
He crawls back up on his feet, wings still hanging limp at his sides; the fury flashes behind his eyes now, a low growl in his voice as he speaks. “I do not kneel.”  
  
  
  
\---  
  
  
  
“This isn’t your war. It never was.”  
  
He tells her this at the tideline of their history, tells her this again now from the heights of his throne in the kingdom he’s always loathed. Everything here stinks of hatred, of disdain, of shame. No wonder the angel wants this misery to cease to exist. 

“It is _now_ , Samael.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please don’t talk to me about timelines. _Shush_ , timelines.
> 
> I'm glad you follow me for this ride, I can't promise we end anywhere near where Season 5 will end but that's the fun of fanfic. Thanks for all your comments, kudos and subs.


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